There are plenty of companies that have affiliate programs with thousands of members. There's no way to keep track of how each of your members are advertising. The results you'll get will be putting lots of innocent companies out of business.
No, it will put companies that spam by hiding behind their affiliates out of business. Those are not innocent companies. Companies with legitimate affiliate programs will make it clear that if you spam, your affiliation will end and you won't receive a dime.
It's fairly clear where you stand on this, and why, since you're sig is an affiliate advertisement for a porn site.
She did so (never actually signing anything), and got the card. She proceeded to charge it up
So, she got some spam offering a card,she followed through to get the card, she charged stuff on the card. Without telling you what I think about people that support spammers, lets move on...
I refuse to pay this off, on principle, at this point.
Quote the guy from SNL some years back : "Yeah, that's the ticket. It's the *principle* of the thing, yeah! My *morals* don't allow me to pay for the stuff I charged. It would be *unethical* to pay my bill after charging a lot of stuff on this card."
You're just crooks who want to buy things without paying for them. Nobody ever made her charge anything, and anyone with real morals would pay their bill.
They can make more money selling your email address to someone else than they can from selling you a product or service
I doubt it. They sell a million email addresses for very little money. That makes an individual address worth *very* little - fractions of a cent. Compare that to one sale for $29.95, and I think it's clear that they make more when you're dumb enough to buy their product/service. Moreover, a list of email addresses from people who have been stupid enough to buy from spam before is probably worth a lot more money than just any old address that they can show will accept delivery.
ah, but surely even though she filled it in she disposed of it in a bin on purpose. Her "intent" being that after reading the small print that she was not going to proceed with the application.
How do you propose she prove in court that she threw it in the trash? I seriously doubt that she has video tape of her putting it in the trash and them getting it out again, and the company isn't likely to testify "Our policy is that if they fill out the form and throw it away, our people are supposed to dig it out of the trash and send it in."
I don't like what the company did, but if it went to court, I suspect their story would be "Yes, she forgot to sign, but her intent was clear. We'll cancel the VISA card if that is what she wishes to do, so everything is fine". In the meantime, the spammers, telemarketers, and other various scum have her personal information, but I can't see any way to go back and undo that, and a court won't be able to go back and undo that either.
If they follow your advice, they are going to be breaking the law, and they will almost certainly be busted for it. Yes, the company who set them up without permission is slime. Yes, the bastard who pulled their card out of the trash is slime. But someone mistreating you does not mean that from that point on the law doesn't apply to you and you can simply steal with impunity, which is what you are suggesting. "Run up the bill. Lie and claim it wasn't you that did it". Great morals you have there.
What I don't understand is why she threw the form in the trash can right in front of them. Since she had read the fine print and realized that their primary goal was to gather and sell info, she should have known not to trust them. She could have saved herself a lot of trouble by taking it somewhere else, tearing it into pieces, and throwing it away someplace where the data-collector wasn't saying "Here, use my trash can."
Pre-Paid legal gives you unlimited phone access to a lawyer and they will even write letters of make phone calls for you free with your membership ($26 or less per month) and if they did sue you for some reason, you would have 75 hrs of attorney time...
Your redirect goes to prepaidlegal.com - known spammers.
According to
groups.google.com there are 200+ reports of their spam in the sightings newsgroup. The vast majority of spam isn't reported. Having that many reports is pretty convincing evidence. The reason I checked is because I recall having been spammed by them myself.
Despite your saying "I don't want this to be TOO much of a blatant advertisement..:)" I see that you've posted a grand total of five posts to slashdot, and at least three of those were advertisements for prepaidlegal.com.
It may work in Australia, but I ran a test here before I posted, to make sure I was correct (though I was pretty sure anyway), so I know it doesn't work in Texas.
Does it work both ways? You said that if the party that receives the call doesn't hang up, the line will stay open and the caller can't clear the line. Does it work the other way too? If the caller doesn't hang up, but the receiver does, does the line clear? I didn't test it going that direction, but I'm pretty sure that I'd get the same results.
I can see how that could be used in an abusive way. You could call someones house from a payphone in the middle of nowhere, cuss at them till they hang up, and leave the phone off the hook. Their phone would then be useless until someone came along and hung up the pay phone.
You don't need anyone from Telstra to confirm it to me - I believe you. I just know it doesn't work that way here.
My house, my telephone, my rules. I'm not telling them they can't speak. They can say whatever they want to anyone willing to listen. I'm not willing to listen, and the DNC list allows me to say that one time and be done with it, instead of a billion times over and over.
Care to explain why it's so important to you that telemarketers be allowed to call people time and time again with no limitations? No? I didn't think so.
Nonsense. Anyone can verify this. Call a friend. Ask them not to hang up, but to just lay the phone down and go back to whatever they were doing. Now you hang up for a second, pick up your phone, and call someone else. Did their phone being off the hook stop you? Of course not.
In addition, the telemarketers have a *lot* of lines. Even if this worked (which it won't) it wouldn't make a very big difference.
There are situations where leaving the phone off the hook for a bit will help. Is the phone call automated? If so, it's illegal. If you hang up, they'll start calling someone else on that line. If you lay the phone down, they'll go through their spiel first, and then hang up and start calling someone else on that line. It slows them down a little. Not much, just a little. Better is if they have a "leave a message after the beep" thing, because then they don't hang up right away and get a long dead-air recording, but most are more sophisticated than that.
The other time leaving the phone off the hook is if you scam them first. Pretend you're interested but "I have someone at the door" or "Let me pull that pot off the stove" or something, asking them to hold for "just a second". Then put the phone down and let them wait.
I've been a fan of MailWasher. I use Eudora to read my email, but have MailWasher pre-process before Eudora grabs the real mail.
Mailwashwer has several useful features, such as the ability to check against DNS blacklists, but the most important thing for me is the ability to easily whitelist. I let it show all of the spam and unknown mail, and hide the legitimate mail (ie, mail from whitelisted addresses.) When I log on, Mailwasher runs right away (thanks to NetLaunch, another tool I've been very pleased with.) It grabs all the mail and shows me what is mostly just the junk. On occassion I'll get mail from someone not whitelisted, so I do glance through the mailwashwer screen before having it delete the junk, so that I can whitelist them. I could have it auto-delete stuff from blacklisted sites, but I don't trust the blacklists that much, so I just use their info to sort. That means that most of the spam gets sorted to the bottom, with mail (spam or not) from non-blacklisted sites at the top. Obviously, I check the top section fairly close, and do nothing more than a quick glance on the rest. I've also set up a couple of filters so that certain subject line terms likely to be in mail I want would get through regardless of whether the sender is whitelisted.
Once Mailwasher kills off the 100+ spams I'll have overnight, Eudora grabs the rest. A few spams will still slip through for various reasons, but not many. It does mean getting rid of the spam before getting the legitimate mail, which I wish wasn't the case, but it still saves a lot of time compared to having Eudora download everything and filtering it all there.
Mailwasher is free for use, and asks for donations, but all the features worth regardless. They do have a "pro" version that will handle multiple email accounts, Hotmail web based accounts, etc, but I haven't tried it.
The telemarketers (and apparently you, whether you are a telemarketer or not) don't want people to have a right to say "no". The telemarketers already have ways to spoof callerID information, and to outwit a TeleZapper. Article available here.
The TeleZapper also only works after the phone rings. I do a lot of my sleeping during daytime hours, and telemarketers waking me up (despite the fact that I will *never* buy from them) gets very old. The phone is still going to wake me up, even if the telezapper then sends a "disconnected" tone. If my boss or friends feel the need to call, it's probably important, and it's worth waking up for. If it's a telemarketer, they shouldn't be bothering me, and it won't get them anywhere anyway.
First Amendment also does not grant you the right to pass laws abridging freedom of speech -- doesn't matter if you like the speech or not.
The telemarketers and spammers love this argument. It doesn't hold up to the facts, though.
If the law tried to say "You can't market your product" or "You can't say nigger", the law would infringe. However, the marketers aren't being told that they can't say it. They aren't being told that they can't post it on a website, or run a newspaper ad, or buy radio/TV time. They *are* being told that they can't abuse other peoples time and equipment in order to spread their message. I can call someone an asshole, but I can't spraypaint it on the side of their house and car.
I pay for my phone, just as I pay for my internet connection, so that it is available for my use. I don't want telemarketers calling. Why do you have a problem with me saying "No!"?
I don't sympathize with the victims at all - they were idiots, they lost 49.95 each, and they'll probably send more money to another spammer before long.
Even so, the scammer should be punished, hard. I'm not convinced this is hard enough.
The designer also considers everyone who owns a "vanity" domain to be part of the spam problem. When I send email from my domain, whitis.com, he claims I am "forging" my address. His solution? Well, he doesn't have a solution. He says that vanity domain owners can "just not use SPF".
I use a dial up account to get online, so I'm given a new IP every time I log on. That means I can't say "Only mail from this IP is legitimate mail from whitis.com".
Sorry, but when I post using my own email account, through my own domain name, I'm not forging, and I'm not the problem. And any "solution" which means that a large number of legitimate non-spamming domains will have their mail dumped isn't much of a solution. I could get rid of every bit of spam right now, just by turning off email. But while that gets rid of the spam, it also gets rid of the legitimate mail - just like this SPF plan of his.
This isn't a new story, or new website. I dunno if it's been on slashdot, but I visited the site last July. I also joined their mailing list (confirmed opt in, as it should be) at the time. Since the opt-in-confirmation msg, I've received exactly 0 mails from them.
The next paragraph is a quote from their website, at http://spf.pobox.com/faq.html.
Vanity domain owners who are unwilling to accommodate the requirements of SPF are, in a way, due to their principled inertia, part of the spam problem. What is greater: the pain of everyone who is presently flooded with spam, or the pain of the vanity domain owners who will no longer be able to forge their own address?
I'd love a way to stop email from being forged. I've had my domain forged on several occassions, and I receive hundreds of emails every day which have forged addresses. But his solution is that I won't be able to send email. That sucks. And to top it off, he claims that I'm a forger and that I'm part of the problem. That's total bullshit.
Forged email is part of the problem, and we do need to find a way to solve it. But his solution isn't a solution at all.
So, anything you disagree with is an "anecdote", and regardless of many many "anecdotes" which show you are wrong, you're still whining and yelling "You Chump" and such when people disagree with you.
Why is it so important to you that people believe that following opt out instructions in their spam will help? I can think of one logical answer to that, right off the bat.
however when somebody else adds your email to a legitimate email list you don't want(for whatever reason, hell, maybe you did it yourself while drunk and can't remember) opting out is quite wise.
Disagree. If it is a legitimate mailing list, the list will send an email with a confirmation, and you will have to confirm (usually either by replying to the email, or by clicking on a URL) that you want to be on the list. If somebody else signs up your email address, and you ignore the confirmation, then you shouldn't hear from that list any more.
So if I'm on a mailing list, regardless of whether it "looks legitimate" or not, if I didn't ask for it, and I didn't confirm that I wanted to join it, then they are sending spam. I don't know how much they are sending, or where they got my address. Another user may have mis-typed his email address, or typed in what he thought was a BS address. Or the list may have bought a list of "verified opt in addresses". Either way, they are sending me spam, and I'm not going to opt out. There is too much evidence of spammers using opt outs to look for addresses that reach a real person. And there are simple ways for a list which really *is* legitimate to avoid that situation.
I'm calling bullshit on both of them. I challenge anyone here to cite any quantative evidence that replying to spam has resulted in them receiving so much as one extra message.
I have personally created a brand new, previously unused email address and used it to fill out a "remove" request on several occassions. And I've seen spam come to those addresses. So I'm convinced.
You seem to believe that spammers are honest and ethical. There is plenty of evidence to show that they are not, so I doubt I'll be able to convince you.
Spammers spam because the cost to send email to a million people is essentially the same as the cost to send email to 3 million people. They already know that most people do not want their spam. They have no incentive to remove any address at all.
They also know that many of the addresses which they mail are behind a filter of some sort. The ISP/business may use a blacklist, the user may use a spam filtering tool, or whatever. Knowing that spam sent to addressX actually gets through to a real person who reads the mail makes that address worth more to them and other spammers, so they sell it off.
Either you yourself of a spammer, or you're so naive that you'll trust whatever the spammer says, which makes you a great spam target. Is your dick 3 feet long yet?
You don't understand. It isn't outmoded for the record companies. It's outmoded for me as a musician.
Good post. I'm reminded of a quote I heard recently. I liked it enough I made a copy, shown below.
"Dissent and rebellion is what rock 'n' roll was founded on. The record companies back then encouraged it, wanted it, publicized it. But now they don't want no trouble."
-- John Mellencamp
Now how do we get the government to act? Simple--just believe all of the return email addresses on the spam. If I get 30 messages a day that claim to be from hotmail.com addresses, then I'm going to send them all to hotmail. Either they really are hotmail users (no chance of course, but they'd be kicked off if they were), or someone is illegally misrepresenting themselves, and defrauding hotmail to do it. Hotmail should be getting tens of thousands of reports a day from dutiful citizens, until they start to go after spammers stealing their domain name.
So, when a spammer forges my domain, as happened recently, everyone they spam is supposed to bitch and whine to me? Fuck you. I already have to deal with bounces, and now I'm supposed to deal with your complaints, because it's too darn hard for you to do anything other than hit reply and complain to me - a victim.
You, the marketer who sends the unsolicited emails, say "It isn't spam". That's a very common argument. "Yes, it's unsolicited email, but it isn't spam - I think those people might really be interested in whatever it is I'm selling".
The DMA makes the same claim. They want us to believe that UCE from legitimate companies with legitimate email addresses, headers that aren't forged, and working remove addresses isn't spam. But if every DMA member starts sending one UCE a month, my mailbox, and yours, will still be flooded.
The old "My UCE isn't spam" argument is just bull.
It is certainly possible to use email as a marketing medium in a legitimate manner. But to do that, you have to be sending mail to people that solicited it. If it's unsolicited, it's spam.
If you are legitimate, you should be willing to pay your own advertising costs. Don't force that cost on unwilling recipients.
Yes, it is. Especially when you go off into discussions about giving the government rights to read/analyze all the data, which has never been suggested by a sane person.
Some people would prefer that their ISP aggressively block/filter spam. Some would prefer that their ISP do no filtering at all. Others will prefer something in between. It isn't your choice - that's between the ISP and their users. It doesn't involve the government, and it isn't censorship.
Of course he should. That would have stopped the joe-job happening.
Say what? If I filter my mail, how does that in *any way* protect me from some asshole forging my email address in the From line of the spam he is sending? I'm not involved. I'm not sending the spam. I could create a filter so that when the bounces come in, they go to a folder where I don't have to look at them, or I could delete them. But it doesn't stop the joe-job, and it doesn't stop the bounces - it just filters them.
The timing sounds about the same. Did the subject line in the spam say "Want to relieve your pain?"?
Or did the spam try to convince people to visit http://69.60.4.240/ with a web-bugged picture stored at bubb-rubb.biz? If so, then the spams which bounced to you were for the same spammer, mypillsrx.com, as spammed Andy and myself.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it will put companies that spam by hiding behind their affiliates out of business. Those are not innocent companies. Companies with legitimate affiliate programs will make it clear that if you spam, your affiliation will end and you won't receive a dime.
It's fairly clear where you stand on this, and why, since you're sig is an affiliate advertisement for a porn site.
So, she got some spam offering a card,she followed through to get the card, she charged stuff on the card. Without telling you what I think about people that support spammers, lets move on...
I refuse to pay this off, on principle, at this point.
Quote the guy from SNL some years back : "Yeah, that's the ticket. It's the *principle* of the thing, yeah! My *morals* don't allow me to pay for the stuff I charged. It would be *unethical* to pay my bill after charging a lot of stuff on this card."
You're just crooks who want to buy things without paying for them. Nobody ever made her charge anything, and anyone with real morals would pay their bill.
I doubt it. They sell a million email addresses for very little money. That makes an individual address worth *very* little - fractions of a cent. Compare that to one sale for $29.95, and I think it's clear that they make more when you're dumb enough to buy their product/service. Moreover, a list of email addresses from people who have been stupid enough to buy from spam before is probably worth a lot more money than just any old address that they can show will accept delivery.
How do you propose she prove in court that she threw it in the trash? I seriously doubt that she has video tape of her putting it in the trash and them getting it out again, and the company isn't likely to testify "Our policy is that if they fill out the form and throw it away, our people are supposed to dig it out of the trash and send it in."
I don't like what the company did, but if it went to court, I suspect their story would be "Yes, she forgot to sign, but her intent was clear. We'll cancel the VISA card if that is what she wishes to do, so everything is fine". In the meantime, the spammers, telemarketers, and other various scum have her personal information, but I can't see any way to go back and undo that, and a court won't be able to go back and undo that either.
What I don't understand is why she threw the form in the trash can right in front of them. Since she had read the fine print and realized that their primary goal was to gather and sell info, she should have known not to trust them. She could have saved herself a lot of trouble by taking it somewhere else, tearing it into pieces, and throwing it away someplace where the data-collector wasn't saying "Here, use my trash can."
Your redirect goes to prepaidlegal.com - known spammers.
According to groups.google.com there are 200+ reports of their spam in the sightings newsgroup. The vast majority of spam isn't reported. Having that many reports is pretty convincing evidence. The reason I checked is because I recall having been spammed by them myself.
Despite your saying "I don't want this to be TOO much of a blatant advertisement.. :)" I see that you've posted a grand total of five posts to slashdot, and at least three of those were advertisements for prepaidlegal.com.
Does it work both ways? You said that if the party that receives the call doesn't hang up, the line will stay open and the caller can't clear the line. Does it work the other way too? If the caller doesn't hang up, but the receiver does, does the line clear? I didn't test it going that direction, but I'm pretty sure that I'd get the same results.
I can see how that could be used in an abusive way. You could call someones house from a payphone in the middle of nowhere, cuss at them till they hang up, and leave the phone off the hook. Their phone would then be useless until someone came along and hung up the pay phone.
You don't need anyone from Telstra to confirm it to me - I believe you. I just know it doesn't work that way here.
Care to explain why it's so important to you that telemarketers be allowed to call people time and time again with no limitations? No? I didn't think so.
You say that people are allowed to call you, and you aren't allowed to say no. Care to post your phone number?
In addition, the telemarketers have a *lot* of lines. Even if this worked (which it won't) it wouldn't make a very big difference.
There are situations where leaving the phone off the hook for a bit will help. Is the phone call automated? If so, it's illegal. If you hang up, they'll start calling someone else on that line. If you lay the phone down, they'll go through their spiel first, and then hang up and start calling someone else on that line. It slows them down a little. Not much, just a little. Better is if they have a "leave a message after the beep" thing, because then they don't hang up right away and get a long dead-air recording, but most are more sophisticated than that.
The other time leaving the phone off the hook is if you scam them first. Pretend you're interested but "I have someone at the door" or "Let me pull that pot off the stove" or something, asking them to hold for "just a second". Then put the phone down and let them wait.
Mailwashwer has several useful features, such as the ability to check against DNS blacklists, but the most important thing for me is the ability to easily whitelist. I let it show all of the spam and unknown mail, and hide the legitimate mail (ie, mail from whitelisted addresses.) When I log on, Mailwasher runs right away (thanks to NetLaunch, another tool I've been very pleased with.) It grabs all the mail and shows me what is mostly just the junk. On occassion I'll get mail from someone not whitelisted, so I do glance through the mailwashwer screen before having it delete the junk, so that I can whitelist them. I could have it auto-delete stuff from blacklisted sites, but I don't trust the blacklists that much, so I just use their info to sort. That means that most of the spam gets sorted to the bottom, with mail (spam or not) from non-blacklisted sites at the top. Obviously, I check the top section fairly close, and do nothing more than a quick glance on the rest. I've also set up a couple of filters so that certain subject line terms likely to be in mail I want would get through regardless of whether the sender is whitelisted.
Once Mailwasher kills off the 100+ spams I'll have overnight, Eudora grabs the rest. A few spams will still slip through for various reasons, but not many. It does mean getting rid of the spam before getting the legitimate mail, which I wish wasn't the case, but it still saves a lot of time compared to having Eudora download everything and filtering it all there.
Mailwasher is free for use, and asks for donations, but all the features worth regardless. They do have a "pro" version that will handle multiple email accounts, Hotmail web based accounts, etc, but I haven't tried it.
You can find it at http://www.mailwasher.net/
The telemarketers (and apparently you, whether you are a telemarketer or not) don't want people to have a right to say "no". The telemarketers already have ways to spoof callerID information, and to outwit a TeleZapper. Article available here.
The TeleZapper also only works after the phone rings. I do a lot of my sleeping during daytime hours, and telemarketers waking me up (despite the fact that I will *never* buy from them) gets very old. The phone is still going to wake me up, even if the telezapper then sends a "disconnected" tone. If my boss or friends feel the need to call, it's probably important, and it's worth waking up for. If it's a telemarketer, they shouldn't be bothering me, and it won't get them anywhere anyway.
First Amendment also does not grant you the right to pass laws abridging freedom of speech -- doesn't matter if you like the speech or not.
The telemarketers and spammers love this argument. It doesn't hold up to the facts, though.
If the law tried to say "You can't market your product" or "You can't say nigger", the law would infringe. However, the marketers aren't being told that they can't say it. They aren't being told that they can't post it on a website, or run a newspaper ad, or buy radio/TV time. They *are* being told that they can't abuse other peoples time and equipment in order to spread their message. I can call someone an asshole, but I can't spraypaint it on the side of their house and car.
I pay for my phone, just as I pay for my internet connection, so that it is available for my use. I don't want telemarketers calling. Why do you have a problem with me saying "No!"?
Even so, the scammer should be punished, hard. I'm not convinced this is hard enough.
When you are king, email me. I think I would like to work for you. :^)
I use a dial up account to get online, so I'm given a new IP every time I log on. That means I can't say "Only mail from this IP is legitimate mail from whitis.com".
Sorry, but when I post using my own email account, through my own domain name, I'm not forging, and I'm not the problem. And any "solution" which means that a large number of legitimate non-spamming domains will have their mail dumped isn't much of a solution. I could get rid of every bit of spam right now, just by turning off email. But while that gets rid of the spam, it also gets rid of the legitimate mail - just like this SPF plan of his.
This isn't a new story, or new website. I dunno if it's been on slashdot, but I visited the site last July. I also joined their mailing list (confirmed opt in, as it should be) at the time. Since the opt-in-confirmation msg, I've received exactly 0 mails from them.
The next paragraph is a quote from their website, at http://spf.pobox.com/faq.html.
Vanity domain owners who are unwilling to accommodate the requirements of SPF are, in a way, due to their principled inertia, part of the spam problem. What is greater: the pain of everyone who is presently flooded with spam, or the pain of the vanity domain owners who will no longer be able to forge their own address?
I'd love a way to stop email from being forged. I've had my domain forged on several occassions, and I receive hundreds of emails every day which have forged addresses. But his solution is that I won't be able to send email. That sucks. And to top it off, he claims that I'm a forger and that I'm part of the problem. That's total bullshit.
Forged email is part of the problem, and we do need to find a way to solve it. But his solution isn't a solution at all.
Why is it so important to you that people believe that following opt out instructions in their spam will help? I can think of one logical answer to that, right off the bat.
Disagree. If it is a legitimate mailing list, the list will send an email with a confirmation, and you will have to confirm (usually either by replying to the email, or by clicking on a URL) that you want to be on the list. If somebody else signs up your email address, and you ignore the confirmation, then you shouldn't hear from that list any more.
So if I'm on a mailing list, regardless of whether it "looks legitimate" or not, if I didn't ask for it, and I didn't confirm that I wanted to join it, then they are sending spam. I don't know how much they are sending, or where they got my address. Another user may have mis-typed his email address, or typed in what he thought was a BS address. Or the list may have bought a list of "verified opt in addresses". Either way, they are sending me spam, and I'm not going to opt out. There is too much evidence of spammers using opt outs to look for addresses that reach a real person. And there are simple ways for a list which really *is* legitimate to avoid that situation.
I have personally created a brand new, previously unused email address and used it to fill out a "remove" request on several occassions. And I've seen spam come to those addresses. So I'm convinced.
You seem to believe that spammers are honest and ethical. There is plenty of evidence to show that they are not, so I doubt I'll be able to convince you.
Spammers spam because the cost to send email to a million people is essentially the same as the cost to send email to 3 million people. They already know that most people do not want their spam. They have no incentive to remove any address at all.
They also know that many of the addresses which they mail are behind a filter of some sort. The ISP/business may use a blacklist, the user may use a spam filtering tool, or whatever. Knowing that spam sent to addressX actually gets through to a real person who reads the mail makes that address worth more to them and other spammers, so they sell it off.
Either you yourself of a spammer, or you're so naive that you'll trust whatever the spammer says, which makes you a great spam target. Is your dick 3 feet long yet?
Good post. I'm reminded of a quote I heard recently. I liked it enough I made a copy, shown below.
"Dissent and rebellion is what rock 'n' roll was founded on. The record companies back then encouraged it, wanted it, publicized it. But now they don't want no trouble." -- John Mellencamp
So, when a spammer forges my domain, as happened recently, everyone they spam is supposed to bitch and whine to me? Fuck you. I already have to deal with bounces, and now I'm supposed to deal with your complaints, because it's too darn hard for you to do anything other than hit reply and complain to me - a victim.
I have a page about forgeries to my domain at http://www.whitis.com/mypillsrx.htm
The same spammer was recently discussed in an article, with a /. discussion following it. See
this link.
The DMA makes the same claim. They want us to believe that UCE from legitimate companies with legitimate email addresses, headers that aren't forged, and working remove addresses isn't spam. But if every DMA member starts sending one UCE a month, my mailbox, and yours, will still be flooded.
The old "My UCE isn't spam" argument is just bull.
It is certainly possible to use email as a marketing medium in a legitimate manner. But to do that, you have to be sending mail to people that solicited it. If it's unsolicited, it's spam.
If you are legitimate, you should be willing to pay your own advertising costs. Don't force that cost on unwilling recipients.
No, this isn't a a daft claim
Yes, it is. Especially when you go off into discussions about giving the government rights to read/analyze all the data, which has never been suggested by a sane person.
Some people would prefer that their ISP aggressively block/filter spam. Some would prefer that their ISP do no filtering at all. Others will prefer something in between. It isn't your choice - that's between the ISP and their users. It doesn't involve the government, and it isn't censorship.
Of course he should. That would have stopped the joe-job happening.
Say what? If I filter my mail, how does that in *any way* protect me from some asshole forging my email address in the From line of the spam he is sending? I'm not involved. I'm not sending the spam. I could create a filter so that when the bounces come in, they go to a folder where I don't have to look at them, or I could delete them. But it doesn't stop the joe-job, and it doesn't stop the bounces - it just filters them.
I tried to visit your site to read about it, but, as they say, "It's dead Jim".
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