When a spammer provides a web address in his message, that is an explicit solicitation to me to visit his site.
There is nothing illegal or abusive about doing what the spammer wants. He has no say or control over how I go about visiting that site.
Any email which is treated to this type of response (i.e., downloading the spamvertized web pages) needs to be classified as spam, or at least possible spam. How you detect the good emails will vary: filter, whitelist, magic 8 ball, for different users and different products. But those known or suspected good emails should not be subjected to having all their links downloaded.
The newsletters I subscribe to, up to and including the 200,000+ subscriber ones, don't look anything like my spam. Unless your newsletter is easily confused with spam, you should only be subjected to automated page hits while your subscribers are training their filters.
Driving the pay-per-clicked links numbers up, though automatic page loads, passes the cost of spam back to the (direct or indirect) source of that spam. The whole problem of spam exists because the costs associated with it are not borne by the spammer, but by the spamee.
ISPs will be less inclined to tolerate spamvertised sites when the impact is shifted from their abuse desk to their bandwidth bills, unless the spammer site pays for the increased traffic. Think traffic in proportion to the number of spams sent, vs the number of responders as seen in a previous article: Following the Spam Trail
When the spammer's profits disappear, so will the spam.
Intuit seems to have bought in to a Microsoft-like attitude towards its software users. They seem to have adopted the attitude that all their users are thieves - that given the chance, they will steal the software.
This attitude was prevalent in the 1980's. The inconvenience and loss of productivity associated with copy protection schemes led me to eliminate those products from consideration when recommending and specifying software purchases. Products with copy protection features were simply not an option. Today my response is exactly the same. I vote with my dollars. I choose not to purchase software from vendors which assume that I will attempt to steal their products.
For a number of years I have been a regular user of the Intuit products, including Quicken, Quick Books and Quick Tax. Stories about the product activation features in the current versions of Quicken prompted my decision to NOT upgrade Quicken or Quick Books and to find alternatives to meet my personal and corporate accounting needs. The stories (which first appeared some time ago, but without details of the mechanism) about Quick Tax, led me to purchase the TaxWiz product this year.
I will not recommend or purchase any (non-game) software which can leave me without access to my data.
I think that an understanding of human nature is almost more important here on the web than in any other business environment. Why? because unlike in the real world we are used to, we've been trained to an 'us and them' mentality in regards to our entertainment and things that we purchase in stores - we are consumers, they are providers. On the net, its different. We are all one in the same - fredart.com was just as accessible as ibm.com. We all can make websites. We all KNOW we have the ability to reach millions of people. Many sites, even Megatokyo itself, has proven that individuals can do this. You dont need to be a big corporation. We all have the same basic presence on the net - its how we use it that makes us who we are here.
I found this gentle rant had a well considered analysis of how some people perceive the web. While some parts of the web enhance and complement my traditional information needs, such as dictionary lookups, news, product information, the volume and diversity of the rest of the web helps me to "see further" (to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton). I can start by building on the knowledge and experience of others, rather than repeating their trials and experiments.
Piro discusses adding something very much like a bait-and-switch scheme to the Field of Dreams business model. "If you build it, they will come". I think this strategy works well for making information available, but does not work well for making money from those visitors, unless they have come visiting intending to spend money.
My first thought was to see what the HTML Validator at HTML Validation Service had to say about their www.msn.com page. MSN seems to be blocking it, 'cause it gets the "browser upgrade" page too.
... And even that simple page fails the validation.
I would guess that the server side code is checking the user agent field very early in the page generation process, so that later on their html generation code doesn't need to do that check.
I used IE to save the complete page and uploaded the html file to the W3C validator. This page fails on the first line - the DOCTYPE! The document claims HTML 4.0, while the validator expects HTML 4.01. So much for using the latest HTML standards
Here in Canada, many software stores have a stated return policy which explicitly excludes the return of opened software products.
Some explain that the reasons for this policy are copyright issues. Presumably, you could have installed the software, or copied the media (CDROM) before returning it.
This makes it tough to return the product if we don't agree with the license, which is packed inside, and is twice as large as the American edition, since it appears in both official languages.
Slashdot Mirror
When a spammer provides a web address in his message, that is an explicit solicitation to me to visit his site. There is nothing illegal or abusive about doing what the spammer wants. He has no say or control over how I go about visiting that site.
Any email which is treated to this type of response (i.e., downloading the spamvertized web pages) needs to be classified as spam, or at least possible spam. How you detect the good emails will vary: filter, whitelist, magic 8 ball, for different users and different products. But those known or suspected good emails should not be subjected to having all their links downloaded.
The newsletters I subscribe to, up to and including the 200,000+ subscriber ones, don't look anything like my spam. Unless your newsletter is easily confused with spam, you should only be subjected to automated page hits while your subscribers are training their filters.
Driving the pay-per-clicked links numbers up, though automatic page loads, passes the cost of spam back to the (direct or indirect) source of that spam. The whole problem of spam exists because the costs associated with it are not borne by the spammer, but by the spamee.
ISPs will be less inclined to tolerate spamvertised sites when the impact is shifted from their abuse desk to their bandwidth bills, unless the spammer site pays for the increased traffic. Think traffic in proportion to the number of spams sent, vs the number of responders as seen in a previous article: Following the Spam Trail
When the spammer's profits disappear, so will the spam.
Intuit seems to have bought in to a Microsoft-like attitude towards its software users. They seem to have adopted the attitude that all their users are thieves - that given the chance, they will steal the software.
This attitude was prevalent in the 1980's. The inconvenience and loss of productivity associated with copy protection schemes led me to eliminate those products from consideration when recommending and specifying software purchases. Products with copy protection features were simply not an option. Today my response is exactly the same. I vote with my dollars. I choose not to purchase software from vendors which assume that I will attempt to steal their products.
For a number of years I have been a regular user of the Intuit products, including Quicken, Quick Books and Quick Tax. Stories about the product activation features in the current versions of Quicken prompted my decision to NOT upgrade Quicken or Quick Books and to find alternatives to meet my personal and corporate accounting needs. The stories (which first appeared some time ago, but without details of the mechanism) about Quick Tax, led me to purchase the TaxWiz product this year.
I will not recommend or purchase any (non-game) software which can leave me without access to my data.
I found this gentle rant had a well considered analysis of how some people perceive the web. While some parts of the web enhance and complement my traditional information needs, such as dictionary lookups, news, product information, the volume and diversity of the rest of the web helps me to "see further" (to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton). I can start by building on the knowledge and experience of others, rather than repeating their trials and experiments.
Piro discusses adding something very much like a bait-and-switch scheme to the Field of Dreams business model. "If you build it, they will come". I think this strategy works well for making information available, but does not work well for making money from those visitors, unless they have come visiting intending to spend money.
My first thought was to see what the HTML Validator at HTML Validation Service had to say about their www.msn.com page. MSN seems to be blocking it, 'cause it gets the "browser upgrade" page too.
... And even that simple page fails the validation.
I would guess that the server side code is checking the user agent field very early in the page generation process, so that later on their html generation code doesn't need to do that check.
I used IE to save the complete page and uploaded the html file to the W3C validator. This page fails on the first line - the DOCTYPE! The document claims HTML 4.0, while the validator expects HTML 4.01. So much for using the latest HTML standards
Some explain that the reasons for this policy are copyright issues. Presumably, you could have installed the software, or copied the media (CDROM) before returning it.
This makes it tough to return the product if we don't agree with the license, which is packed inside, and is twice as large as the American edition, since it appears in both official languages.