Slashdot Mirror
Do Something About Your Spam
Wonko42 writes "There's an article somewhere over here that talks about the Spam Recycling Center, an effort to prosecute illegal and fraudulent spammers. If you send your spam to them, they'll give you $5 credit at CDNow.com. Couldn't be a better deal, if you ask me. The results of this will be sent to CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, which will study the emails and figure out what evil things spammers are doing most and then send all the data to the Federal Trade Commission. "
International Business Lists (IBL), a privately held company, was
incorporated in the State of Illinois in 1988. The company's growth
and reputation are built on expertise in list compiling, list and
order fulfillment services, database building and maintenance,
profiling and the creation of customized lead generation programs.
Located in downtown Chicago, IBL has an in-house data center
containing IBM, mainframe and Pentium PRO processing capabilities and
a full line of custom and packaged direct marketing software.
IBL's customer base includes leading companies in business segments
such as computers and computer software, telecommunications,
insurance, financial services, communications, credit bureaus,
telemarketing, fundraising, retail and wholesale, market research,
membership associations and publishing.
wow, perhaps this is the biggest scam of them all.
If I remember correctly, someone from ChooseYourMail.com was at the Mail Abuse Round Table at the ISP Forum in San Diego.
It was actually quite amusing. These guys send bulk e-mail but they claim none of it is unsolicited. The guy got up in front of a room full of postmasters and abuse administrators and tried to rationalize what they do.
Personally, I think the company is legitimate and they are trying to do e-mail marketing to people who want it. At least this guy was at the round table and wanted to find out how they could do this without pissing off the recipients. I don't think they're going to go away any time soon unless the CDNow thing bankrupts them (I doubt it).
Sorry for any typographical errors. Slashdot is too heavily loaded for me to preview right now
My general annoyance with spam is that the majority of spammers out there are seedy people. When these people are investigated on news.admin.net-abuse.email, it is often found out that these people have criminal records, or are investigated for illegal activities. Examples:
- The "Lindsey Ontario" spammer (sends a "work at home" fraud one to everyone who posts to Usenet) has a large debt owed to the Canadian government for tax evasion.
- "Krazy Kevin" was investigated by the FTC (or was it the FBI) for fraud. Happily, the police visiting his place have stopped him from spamming every single mailing list he can find.
- "TCPS" (Michael Alvin) has no respect for the needs of the ISP, and continues to send pornographic spam to any and all email address he can find, with no regard for the age of the person getting the email. He is facing a lawsuit from UUNET, and a lawsuit from Juno.com for disregarding "ceast and desist" orders.
Getting one email from someone like this is enough for me to stop what I am doing, spend the next 30 minutes finding out what ISP he used to send out his garbage, and complain to the ISPs in question. A deja.com search is also not uncommon for me.Messages from more legitimate corporate entities are less bothersome to me.
Ugh! Even thinking about these spammers can ruin a perfectly good day for me!
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
1) To get your $5 off, just click the button. No spam-sending seems to be necessary, but they DO want your email address. Go figure. You sure that's worth $5?
2) As pointed out elsewhere, these people specialize in BUILDING mailing lists and advertising profiles. Granted, it's an opt-in system, but I'm not inclined to trust them to shield me from spam.
3) If you're going to take the time to forward your spam, forward it to the system that it originated from, and any legit reply-to addresses or web pages listed in the spam. Most services have an abuse@ email, you can visit their site to find out. Learn to read the headers to avoid the decoys. It's quite the feeling of empowerment to get a message back saying that the account has been canceled, or to visit the web page the next day and see a 404 Not Found message.
Seems to me that what is really needed is a national database of spammers that ISPs can consult, so that the spammers can't hop from one service to another as they get discovered.
I can't figure out why the CAUCE page links to these guys... it sure seems shady to me.
Interesting how these people:
Chooseyourmail.com
162 North Franklin
Chicago, IL 60606
US
312-236-0350 (FAX) 312-236-4092
seem to share so much with THESE people:
International Business Lists (IBLI-DOM)
http://www.ibli.com
162 North Franklin Street
Chicago, IL 60606
US
312.236.0350 (FAX) 312.236.4092
It used to be that you could cross-reference domains by taking the contact handles and doing a search on those. That showed you all the domains that a person was associated with, assuming they used the same NIC handle. Looks like this feature no longer works, or I've forgotten how to do it.
If you go to http://www.askreggie.com you can do a similar cross-reference through a browser. It works like a regular whois, but the results let you click on the company name and it will bring up a list of domains owned by that company.
It's also helpful to look up the domains that appear in the contact e-mail addresses, especially the admin and billing contacts.
I emailed the people at chooseyourmail.com asking why they sell addresses and such and here is the response I got:
We do not sell email addresses nor are we a "front" for email gathering.
Yes we are majority owned by IBL Inc. IBL is a database marketing company that builds large scale databases for many Fortune 500 companies. IBL deals mostly with business data, not consumer, and has absolutely no data sharing with ChooseYourMail.com. We are two separate companies and we share office space and data center facilities in their Chicago headquarters.
I can see how this could raise an eyebrow. If we did what you acuse, ISP associations, anti-spam groups, even the FTC, wouldn't support us.
If you'd like to talk, please give me a call at your convenience.
** Contact Information Withheld by DaBuzz **
I may give him a call and talk a bit about it to see what kind of "feel" I get from him. I guess we'll see in the long run.
Notice how the company doing this is also a spammer?
:-) :-)
They call themselves a responsible opt-in spammer, and they don't ask for demographics. But this seems like a great way to harvest good email addresses.
Would it be wrong to forward them the spam with all your details faked so they couldn't add you to thier spam mailing list?
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Hi -- I'm on the CAUCE Board of Directors (check the web page to be sure, there are a lot of idjits out there.) I'm also the postmaster. In this message, I'm speaking on behalf of the Coalition.
The recycling center is going to store the submissions that they receive so that we can do some statistical analysis. Please don't just randomly send stuff to CAUCE addresses, though, 'cause that just gets you e-mail from me saying "please stop."