Spammer Gets Spammed

William L. Jones sent us a link to a wired story about spammers getting what they deserve: it amused me. What also amuses me is my new hobby: I now send the postage-page envelopes back from junk mailers. Empty. Eat that! 30 cents out of your pocket! Yeah! I guess now that we've evolved past sword fights, I need something to vent steam.

Re:Remember...

I was a Telemarketer for 3 months. I enjoyed it, the pay was good, and the more weird calls or ranting people I got the better. If someone had a good line to screw with me for a while it made my night interesting. I loved getting snappy comebacks before a hangup or anything out of the ordinary. So please, do Telemarketers a favor when they call you late at night, don't just hang up on them, say something witty or obscene THEN hang up on them. It actually does make the night more amusing.

Kintanon

Yeah, yeah

The reason that people take some joy in this is that UUNET is considered to be pretty lackadaisical about fighting spam. Whatever their corporate mouthpieces say, their behavior suggests that they don't consider spam to be that big a problem. Or at least that they consider it to be somebody else's problem. Now perhaps they'll take it more seriously.

Note that this is probably not "an eye for an eye", in that nobody spammed them specifically to punish them for their previous spammer-friendly behavior; it appears that they just got buried in a normal spam run, the same kind of spam run that originates from their network all too frequently.

This is more akin to a policeman on the night watch who parks his squad car and takes an illicit nap, finding on waking that somebody stole his tires. There is a certain poetic justice that's less "an eye for an eye" than "what goes around, comes around".

Few would vote for raping the rapist, but equally few will shed tears for the rapist who, in spite of our efforts to prevent rape, is raped by a bigger, meaner rapist. Buddhists work to end the suffering of all sentient beings, but that doesn't mean they can't appreciate the beautiful symmetry of karmic balance.

Re:Junk mail subsidizes first class mail

Nice guess, but it doesn't work that way. Automated postage (1st, 2nd, and 3rd class) are given a discount. Theoretically because they don't need as much work done with them due to bar coding, automation equipment, etc. (Barcoding is done on many units: The article itself, the bundled units, mail bags, pallets). The horrid truth though, is that most of these expensive automative machines weren't even into effect until recently...even though you'd have guessed they'd been around for decades.

Other types of mail income are used to offset these costs. 2nd class postage is a great example: a new subdivision called "Priority 2nd Class" has been given to monstrous magazines (think: U.S. News, Time, etc) To get their business, the USPS has given special treatment and costs, while those not qualifying (any magazine/newspaper under a zillion subscribers) have seen significant increase in postage. Example: 14% increase every other year. The post office has made it clear that these types of mailers are a hindrance, and a pain in the ass to the USPS. They would rather deliver sorted pallets by the truckload than break it down further.

On a smaller scale you'll see the same with 1st class. It's harder for the USPS to do this, because every citizen is affected by increases in 1st class mail, while only publishers are affected by 2nd class increases...Fewer people can complain..and so the raping of 2nd class continues.

Anyway, in the beginning, the USPS was in business to deliver your personal mail. As they grew, and tried to take more money, get more customers (Like all the dirty tricks they used to (and still do) against UPS) and allow bulk mail, etc, etc, they have since had to buy more facilities, more equipment, and many many many more employees. As they continue to make better bottom lines on large customers, they will continue to abhor your mail and mine. Our costs will increase. Eventually the cost will make us cut down our mailing. It already has. How many stamps can you get for $1. Ooops, not even 3 now.

I remember back in the '80s, once a month, letter mail that used to take 1 day to get here, took 2 days instead. What was going on? Turned out that it was all related to the day the new Playboy issue came out. Playboy paid a cheap automation rate that covered the automation costs of the USPS, but it was our 1st class mail that suffered, and paid for the extra employees and leg work that was needed.

Rader

Remember...

To combat telemarketters, it's not illegal to harass *them* if they called *you* (er... last I heard)... so go ahead... tell them your deepest and darkest secret.

a buddy of mine: "oh really? well let me tell *you* about the *great* anal sex I had last night" ... click.

----

Re:Remember...

Telemarketer: "Hello Mr. X, let me tell you about this great offer..."
Me: "May I ask your name?"

Telemarketer: "Joe...I have a great dea..."
Me: "May I ask your last name Joe?"

Telemarketer: "I don't see why you'd need that."
Me: "May I remind you that under FCC regulation you are required to state your first and last name upon request?"

Telemarketer: "..I didn't know that...Joe Doe."
Me: "Then I guess I can inform you that it is your employer's responsibility to inform you of FCC regulations, and that if you're going to making these calls, the FCC requires you to know these regulations. If your employer does not inform you of the regulations, they are committing a felony. May I ask your employers name?"

Telemarketer: "Wow... I didn't know that. I work for Credit Card Company X."
Me: "Joe, I asked YOUR employer. You work for a telemarketing firm, not a credit card company."

Telemarketer: "I'm not allowed to tell you that.
Me: "Then I may remind you that under FCC regulation that you MUST state your employer's name as well as your immediate supervisor's name upon request."

Me: "Furthermore, if I request to be added to your 'Do not call' list, you MUST add me to the list. If your employer is not keeping a list, they are subject to fines up to $500,000, and I am entitled to a $500 voucher."

Telemarketer: "Sir, I just called to ask..."
Me: "You never stated your employers name. Please don't commit a felony, Joe."

Telemarketer: "Phone Services X."
Me: "Please add me to your do not call list. If I get a call from Phone Services X within the next 5 years, I will hold you, Joe Doe, and your employer, Phone Services X, responsible. I will contact the FCC and you will be prosecuted."

*click*

Re:Jeovah (was Re:Remember...)

(You are correct about the English rendition of their moniker...)

A friend of mine gave me a very simple approach to get to leave temporiarily: Answer the door with your phone in your hand.

For a more permanant solution, answer the door with the lower receiver of your AR-15 in one hand, and your cleaning cloth in the other.

I actually did a variant of this once: I lived in an apartment with an exterior landing that was shared with another apartment. In that other apartment lived (as near as I could tell) a large number of jail-bait teenybobbers who thought they were God's gift to the universe. They would

• Hang out on the stairs, and not get out of anybody's way
• Ask my friends, "Are you over 21? Can you buy beer? Would you buy us a beer?" (to which one of my friends replied, "Yes, but my price would include a live chicken and a weed-whacker")
• Play their atrocious music as loudly as possible

(Before anybody makes the obvious comment: I don't mess with jailbait.)

One day, my friends and I had gone shooting at one of their farms, and we had returned to my place to clean the weapons. The teeny's were doing their usual, hanging around being in everybody's way.

Funny, how people get out of your way when you have a rifle over one shoulder, a shotgun in one hand, an ammo can in the other, and have two holsters on your belt.

After the six of us had each made three trips from the cars, and had finally finished carrying the firearms into the apartment, and had started on the reflex weapons (longbows, crossbows, etc.), the teeny's disappeared into their apartment.

Funny, ever since then the aways got out of our way, never bothered my friends or me, and kept their music at a reasonable level....

Re:Remember...

Or use the method my friend told me about, it's amusing.

telemarketer : Let me tell you about our new deal which allows you to pay multiple credit card bills on one monthly bill, while we take a 50% cut.
You : Wow, that sounds like a GREAT deal. I can't believe it. Honey, come here and listen to this.
telemarketer : Yes, all we have to do now is get all your credit card information, including card number and expiration date.
You : This is a great deal, tell me how to sign up. I can't wait to reap the rewards!

Keep it up, and just like politicians, just avert all questions leading for information with remarks of how great a deal it is. Eventually either the telemarketer gets frustated and hangs up, or you get bored. Sometimes the telemarketers even laugh and voluntarily let you go.

Or you can just follow the information at the JunkBuster's telemarketing-reduction page [junkbusters.com].

Dude, evolve some more

Empty? No, tape them to hunks of steel or large bricks. Then you cost them a couple of bucks instead of a measly $.30. Apparently some (all?) postmasters will refuse to deliver these, but I suspect that isn't strictly legal. Anyway, it puts pressure on the PO to get things changed as well.
--
MailOne [openone.com]

before the web...

...my pop was owner of a company and got several calls a day requesting donations.

he finally started saying "Oh, you need to talk to the corporate office, and ask for Mr. Wolf."

Of course, he gave them the ph. number of the local zoo...

Re:Credit card/solicitation calls

I had heard this same line about "4 to 6 weeks". However, if you read through Junkbuster's site, you'll find this gem from Section L, subsection e 2 iii:

Recording, disclosure of do-not-call requests:
If a person or entity making a telephone solicitation (or on whose behalf a solicitation is made) receives a request from a residential telephone subscriber not to receive calls from that person or entity, the person or entity must record the request and place the subscriber's name and telephone number on the do-not-call list at the time the request is made.

[junkbusters.com]

http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/fcc.html

This seems to say that even if they have some processing to do, they are liable the instant you notify them. Try quoting this section to them and see how they respond.

Re:spam fighting

check out spamcop [spamcop.net]. They'll notify abuse@, postmaster@, etc., on your behalf. Just cut and paste your spam into their web form. Their cgi does the rest. Scans the headers, locates the true source(s) of the spam, looks up any links/email addresses in the message itself. Works great.

So do something positive (but annoying)

OK, so "taking it out" on the low guys isn't the best solution. Maybe telling them about anal sex or verbally abusing them isn't the answer.

One Mormon guy I know starts telling telemarketers about his religious beliefs -- annoying, yes, but at worst he's annoying, and at best he can hope he's changing someone's life. So why not try evangelizing YOUR favorite cause, religion, book, band, or whatever you think might make the world a better place!

TELEMARKETER: I'm calling to inform you about HomeSelect, a brand new program from MegaCard...
YOU: That's great! You know, I have something I'm really excited about too -- have you ever used the open source text editor vim? I've been using things like BBEdit and CodeWrite for a while, but vim is amazing.

(And now the question is, who will flame me first? People who don't like Mormonism? People who don't like vim? BBEdit Bigots? CodeWrite haters? I love slashdot! )

--

Other proven uses of post-paid envelopes and cards

About a decade ago myself and a few friends decided to take action to increase the demand side of the economic equation for recycled paper. At the time, supply of post-consumer recycled paper was about three times larger than demand.

What we did was go to all the libraries and workplaces we could, gather all the postage-paid subscription cards, and write various different economic messages, asking the magazines and software companies to use recycled paper for some of their material. For software companies, it was the manuals; for magazines it was just the insert cards (paper plants to produce clay-content magazine picture quality paper did not exist in North America at the time).

One of the reasons it worked was we had a limited targetted message asking for something that was not only acheivable, but was cheaper too.

For some of these we made stamps to stamp all the cards. Then when our group had collected a few thousand of the cards, we'd send off bundles of 100 or so in different mailboxes throughout the city. For a period of five to ten days. Which meant that thousands of these postage-paid cards would flood the target for weeks on end, from various places, and various people, all at the cost of the magazine which published them.

As a result, a number of positive things happened. Magazines started to send only three or four of those post-paid insert cards in the magazine (before we'd get 20-30 per issue, which kept falling out). They started using recycled paper for the inserts, and sometimes even the magazine (e.g. Science News). And software manuals started being printed on recycled paper.

And since demand for recycled paper increased ten-fold, new non-chlorine recycled paper plants were built in the US and Canada, saving untold forests from being logged.

If only everyone were like me....

My practice for years has been to simply set the phone down gently and let them talk on. Occasionally, if I walk by the phone a few minutes later and they're still talking, I'll pick up the receiver and say "Go on," or, "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that last part, could you go over that again," and set the phone back down. Sometimes they catch on quickly, of course, but some callers will go through their entire script without noticing I'm not there.

The point is not to piss off the telemarketer, that's just fortuitous. The point is to take up as much time on a fruitless call as possible.

Telemarketers' business models depend on their getting through the negative calls in as little time as possible. That is, they *depend* on us snarling and hanging up on them. If instead, the custom were to chat with them indefinitely, the business would become unprofitable, because they couldn't cycle through the negative calls quickly enough to get to a profitable margin of positives. In a polite society, telemarketing doesn't work.

Re:Remember...

Yeah, it really strikes a blow against telemarketing to take it out on the poor guy making minimum wage whose circumstances have made him desperate enough to take one of the worst jobs in the universe.

The same can't be said for spammers, though, since they typically are self-employed jerks...

Spam revenge

Time was, people would take the blow-in cards from their magazines and avail themselves of the Business Reply Mail system by taping them to bricks, on the presumption that snail-mail charged by the pound for BRM. It was also popular to do this to the ubiquitous American Express applications.

Did it work? Maybe. The Annals of Improbable Research (www.improb.com), formerly the Journal of Irreproducible Results (URL to hijacked IP denigrated), published a study in which they had mailed odd and bulky items with correct postage and addresses. The USPS seems to have been imperfectly willing to maintain their unflappable image (what unflappable image!), so not everything got to where it was supposed to.

--Blair
"The bison's in the mail."

Re:Remember...

Check this out [crtc.gc.ca].

They show the current rules there and explain how they are trying to get complete coverage of these rules. There's also a link to the document, but this press release sums it up quitenicely.

I found it interesting that they prefer HTML for electronic comments...

Don't just send them empty!

I've been doing this for years. Instead of empty I toss in some prizes. That way the person opening the letter will have something to talk about on their break. All kinds of things have found a new home this way:

- Little plastic army men.
- Out of focus photographs.
- Change. (Costing more in postage than it's worth)
- Lettuce.
- A printed warning about the Goodtimes virus.

Re:Remember...

I don't see it that way.

That "poor guy" made the decision to take a job as un-ethical as telemarketing. He knows going into the job he will get abuse, and personally, I think he deserves it.

I consider telemarketing to be the worst kind of spam... at least with postal spam or email spam I can easily dismiss it, and it ususally doesn't interrupt what I'm doing at the moment.

Re:Lex Talionis is a morally bankrupt code

dude, get some perspective. I've put in my share of hours deleting spam, but come on - comparing that to rape?

We're in our cushy air conditioned offices working on computers and suddenly exacting retribution on a spammer is "brutish"? It's like a playful slap on the wrist, which will perhaps make them a little wiser.

Re:Dude, evolve some more

I think flat scrap iron would be the thing. That way it will fit *inside* the envelope. See this article [improbable.com] for more info about what you might be likely to get away with mailing. And be sure to give your postal servant a small box of chocolates as a thanks.

Re:Remember...

And if the poor guy were getting minimum wage for killing people, would you say that we should feel sorry for him?

Sorry, there's no ethical "get out of jail free" card for the poor. Just because someone is willing to pay for a service doesn't make it right.
--G

Awesome link!

That was a great site! The scientific language kills me. They neglected a fruitful area of inquiry though: malformed addresses on otherwise normal items of mail. Heinlein commented in one of his books about receiving an (international!) piece of mail addressed to "Robert Heinlein, The United States". That was the sole address and (obviously) it got to him.
--
MailOne [openone.com]

Don't respond!

Don't send email to removal lists or to [e-mail]!

This may be a way for them to confirm.

If they have a domain, trace it back to their provider! Let their provider cut off the service or their provider's provider do it.

I have called spammers and they hang up, so I call back and explain to them how rude it is.

What we have to do is to stop the people providing the SPAM lists. What about the SPAMMERs using open relays being charged with the computer tresspass statute--for using a mail relay w/o authorization?

Send "sparkles"

I have it (on fairly good authority) that the best (worst) thing you can do to a junk mailer is send back those postage paid envelopes with an oz or so of the "sparkles" you can get in most craft shops.

They are stick tenaciously to EVERYTHING, including the scan heads of the mail sorters, and jam up the works. Word has it that it takes about 1/2 hour to clean up after this happens

Re:Dude, evolve some more

Empty? No, tape them to hunks of steel or large bricks. Then you cost them a couple of bucks instead of a measly $.30. Apparently some (all?) postmasters will refuse to deliver these, but I suspect that isn't strictly legal. Anyway, it puts pressure on the PO to get things changed as well.

Don't worry, the ever resourceful Post Office has tought of it, too, and it won't work [straightdope.com].

Sorry.

--