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Spam

Legitimate Business Spam 205

Posted by CmdrTaco from the its-almost-as-bad dept.
TreeRat sent us a Salon story by Simson Garfinkle about legit companies and spam. Its an interesting piece: it talks mostly about Caldera, but mentions several other offenders. The Spam in my INBOX is somewhere aroung 20-30 a day (mind you most of it is press releases from PR firm mailing lists, and random lists that "helpful" slashdot readers subscribed me to). Thank god for filters. But this is a problem we don't think as much about -- normally we think of spammers as slimeballs in basement sending out a hundred thousand emails advertising 'printer toner sale' or 'hot naked sluts want you' featuring 900 numbers and typos, not legitimate businesses.
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Legitimate Business Spam More

Legitimate Business Spam

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  • NEVER NEVER NEVER (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ask for the government to make laws. They do that enough as it is, and invariably make them poorly. Furthermore, they would of course allow loopholes that let legitimit companies send spam, while allowing all bad people to get punished. The absolute last thing I want my govermnet doing is making laws, thank you very much.

  • Re:ME TOO!!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    yeah did you take the anal adventure package or the vaginal voyage package?
  • No! You should be glad if they make it illegal. It will make your collection worth more. ;)
  • I use nope@hotmail.com. If someone actually has that account, I bet they're pretty pissed. :)
  • No, they have a moral obligation to society to get another job.

    I will be charitable and assume you are not being serious.

    I case you are being serious, then I will assume you believe society has a moral obligation to offer everybody an alternative job to making telemarketing calls.

    I've had friends who have had to get this kind of job to survive.

  • Those who call have the choice whether or not the take the job.

    Those who run the business have the choice whether or not to offer that kind of job. People who take the job need the money.

    People need to learn personal responsibility for their own actions.

    Yes, but for some strange reason you may fail to comprehend, some people find that feeding themselves and their family takes priority over that.

    Really, what's up with you and the other poster who replied to me? Have y'all never suffered through having hardly any money, and having to take a stupid job to survive?

  • My question is, if they were rude enough to call me in the first place, i think i have the right to be a complete ass to them, no?

    You gain nothing by being rude to the caller. He/she is just someone making not much money, and will no power to make it stop. The ones who pay for this kind of stupid show are happily isolated from all your abuse if you attack the poor chap who makes the call.

  • I had one this long weekend. I started getting spam from my ISP. Not, you understand, a free ISP where Ive agreed to recieve spam, but an ISP where I pay for my Internet access.

    So now the weasels are spamming me on behalf of their "business partners." While they certainly won't be my ISP past this weekend, and thier business partners (a nominally legitimate firm) will be getting told how pissed off I am), it's a pretty good example of the problem, with a slightly different spin.

    Of course, this example raises it to a whole new level. Had it been the business spamming me, I could have gone after them. Instead, my ISP will doubtless simply retrospectively change their T&Cs to include, "and you will accept any crap our partners give us a kick-back for".

    And if you're considering joining IHUG in .au or .nz, don't. Since you'll end up paying for a mountain of unsolicited crap in your inbox.

  • You ever had administrative responsibility over a server that some spammer has used? Do you know what sort of beating even a modestly powered box running sendmail+FreeBSD takes when it gets abused by a spammer? Do you know what sort of bandwidth a few hundred simultaneous SMTP sessions all sending 20k messages eats up? In short, spam may not be that big of a deal on the client side (procmail is a godsend in this respect), but it's total hell on the mail server that has to distribute all that meat.
  • I swear, during the Windows install of Real Player 7 you have to uncheck about 5 boxes on 3 different screens to keep them from pushing you crap.

    Then they put icons in your browser in your quick launch bar, your systray, your browser, your desktop, and your start menu even when you told the installation not to.

    Also the "opt-out" clauses on the page before you download the player are phrased in such a way as to trick someone into agreeing to spam mail when they really don't want it.

    Not like it matters, because even if you do opt out they send you their crap anyway.
  • Oh, I forgot about that.

    Every time I start up the player, I get a dialog to the effect of:

    REAL PLAYER IS NOT CURRENTLY YOUR DEFAULT VIEWER FOR FILES WITH THE .ARJ EXTENSION. DO YOU WANT TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE BY RIGHTING THIS HISTORIC INJUSTICE?
    [Y/Y]
  • Why do you think places like Yahoo! and Hotmail exist? To create spammed email accounts! I figured most everybody did this already, created a couple of emails accounts that they used when asked to enter their email address on a Web site or a registration card.

  • Here's a little story for "legitimate" companies that wish to send advertising. This story is about SSC [ssc.com], which is one of the most reputable companies on the Internet. I would recommend them to anyone, despite this story.

    SSC publishes Linux Journal [linuxjournal.com], one of the oldest (if not the oldest) and easily one of the highest signal-over-noise Linux mags available. I had a fairly long subscription to LJ (which, again, I would recommend despite this incident). One day I got e-mail telling me it was time to renew. Well, this e-mail didn't appear to come from SSC. It gave a different site as the place for credit card orders, had non-SSC "From" and "Reply-To" lines, and a non-SSC origin IP. So, uncomfortable about how my e-mail address was getting picked up, I decided to wait until I could call SSC and find out if the e-mail was from their agent or just some random magazine house trying to scam a commission. After I got a paper renewal notice later, I still hadn't gotten around to calling, so I kept putting my renewal off.

    That was probably a year or 2 ago. I still haven't gotten around to calling. That's my rotten procrastination habit again, I'm sure. But, my point to legitimate companies is this: This whole time I've been procrastinating, SSC has been without my (probably 5-year) subscription. And that's a company I actually like, sending me a notice I actually wanted. You can probably imagine what I think of companies who send me e-mail when I've never even contacted them.

    The moral of this true fable is thus: Go out of your way to demonstrate that you're a previous business contact. Identify who you are and why you have the e-mail address, so that the recipient isn't worried about their personal information getting out. Net folks are far more concerned with whether their privacy than whether they buy something. I'll bet SSC probably knew this, but their agent didn't get it.

    (That said, I'll probably go call them and subscribe to Linux Journal again sometime soon. Now I get to wonder about Boardwatch [boardwatch.com], who is owned by a different company, and wants to charge me more for renewal ($72) than normal people pay for a first subscription. Ah well.)

  • ...and "intelligent slashdot discussion".
    --
  • No, Hotmail doesn't sell its lists to spammers. (At list, I really don't hink so.) However, it does expire unused accounts and allow their names to be reused.
  • How could anyone consider the above as off-topic? Why didn't you moderate any of the parent comments as off-topic since they're all discussing the same topic? If you think it wasn't worth the bonus point usually used by Frac, why not just moderate it as overrated? Did you not care what you called it as long as you reduced Frac's score and karma?
  • (Relax, I didn't take this as a flame :) And even if it did work, why should anyone have to take any action to prevent spam? What if I have kids (I don't), and I don't want them receiving "HOT BACKDOOR SLUTZ!!!" emails? Well, honestly, if you don't want them receiving that kind of thing in their e-mail, either supervise their internet usage, don't give them an e-mail account (or monitor it before letting them use it), or don't let them surf. This sort of bridges two issues here, but quite simply the easiest way to prevent this stuff from reaching supposedly "innocent eyes" is to stop them playing around on the internet in the first place. BTW, I wonder when people will finally realize that kids aren't the braindead sponges they appear to be -- "My kid will never see pornography! I monitor all his TV usage." Yeah, except when he's at his friend's house whose dad leaves the XXX tape rack out in the open by the VCR :) > complain to the uplink I'm not sure if you mean "mail server" or "ISP" by that. But, surprise, surprise, most SPAM is anonymous, and comes without valid headers showing who sent it. It sneaks in through open SMTP servers. I meant the ISP. I must say whenever I've complained about spam to a provider, I've gotten a response. Sometimes the response even includes notice of that account's cancellation. Even when your complaint doesn't nail an individual person or account, ISPs take notice. Hell, even when an open SMTP server allows relaying, if the ISP receives enough complaints (or sees unusually high traffic), they'll usually close the holes. If you don't complain at all, there's not even any chance that anything will be corrected. > Set up a junk account. But then to see your order status or any other mail you still need to visit the junk account. Nope, not at all. But by using a "junk" account for all your online transaction stuff, you reduce the crap that pours into your "normal" account. Y'know, the one you give friends & family & cohorts :) You just check the junk box occasionally (or more frequently when you've ordered something recently). Junkbusters does rock, both the site and the proxy. As far as the AT&T bit, write down the times & dates you've told them to piss off, and if they do it more than three times, go to small claims. Spend $70, a couple of hours, and come home with $500 plus your court costs. And a big ego :P Please don't take this as a flame in any way, I just don't think you've really tried the solutions you propose. Have too. Pthbtbtbtbtbt! (raspberry) :) Seriously, though, yes, I have done some of these. I report spammers frequently, get accounts closed, have a spare account that collects much of my junk (the best part is I recently closed it since I haven't ordered anything for awhile ... next time I order stuff I'll use the new one. Hehehehe. Bouncing spam. :), etc. I haven't had the pleasure of suing a telemarketer, but my folks have. That was fun to watch. Hehehehehe. LCDproc looks pretty damn cool, BTW. Hehehe thanks :)
  • I had an account on an ISP, that I stopped using/paying for/was closed.

    I year after that I reopened it, to an immediate flood of SPAM, that to this day ( three months later ) will not go away.

    I think that I have done the most sensible thing that one can do, have more than one email address.

    .mincus
  • To the porno folks and scam artisits who have given
    unsolicited email advertisements a bad name.
    THANK YOU!!! Because you left such a bad taste
    in everyone's mouth, most legitimate companies will
    think twice before flooding people's mailboxes with
    advertisements. I'm so much happier that society
    agrees with me that email advertisments are scourge;
    it's a much better situtation than the sorry state
    of acceptance when it comes to other media like TV
    or junk snail mail.
  • Too often, arguments about spam focus on two areas:

    1. The spam's content, and
    2. The "legitness" of the sending company.
    Sure, most of the spam you get is from clueless scammers, but spam from "legit" companies costs you exactly as much.

    That's why I'd like to encourage meritorious suits against both classes of spammers, the chickenboners and the "pros". See http://www.suespammers.org [suespammers.org] for hints on how to do it.

    --Tom Geller
    Founder, Suespammers.org

  • The strangest thing is, a lot of companies that require you to give them an email address (like to download RealPlayer for example) do JavaScript/CGI verification on email addresses to make sure you don't put in fluff. They DON'T block, however, addresses like:

    webmaster@insertevilcompanyhere.com

    or

    root@www.whateverevilcompany.com

  • ohhh... what i'd do for a .mil domain name!

  • To be honest, I never really considered that it might use my e-mail to send me an advertisement without first asking my permission.

    Come on. It makes me wonder just how internet-savvy this guy is. Anyone who doesn't use an email address dedicated to receiving spam when they provide information for companies is just asking for it. And no, this isn't a new thing for big companies either, because it actually works -- especially for big companies.

    Oh, and CmdrTaco? That spam I get typically has fewer typos than the average Slashdot article that you guys post. ;)

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • That's the critical difference --- with traditional ads (phone ads, paper ads) the advertising company pays for the distribution.

    I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but in a way, we all pay for snail-mail adverts, too. The post office has to hire people to sort and deliver all the junk that companies send out, and how do you think the post office pays their salaries? Higher postage rates. This is no different than the comment by someone else that we pay $2-3 more per month for Internet access because of spam. We pay more per ounce for a first-class letter than we should have to, because it isn't cheap to employ those people to sort and deliver all of that junk mail. I bet mail delivery people hate paper junk mail as much as sys admins hate spam. After all, they have to physically cart the stuff around.

    Disclaimer: I get as much or more spam as real mail, so trust me, I'm no fan of the stuff. But let's keep things in perspective.

  • what about .ca, .uk, .it, .pl, etc :)
  • I've never seen one that will reject a domain of only one character followed by a .net, .org, etc.

    why would it? check out x.com [x.com] and x.org [x.org]
  • Wow! I thought I was the only one to get the printer toner spam! Cool, I don't feel so alone.
  • You are right, this is not the way to go about it. I liked the article until the point where he said what should be done about spam.

    In addition to your points, I don't see why the author wants to restrict pornography spam first.. all spam is a form of harassment, so all of it should be made illegal. This solution also doesn't allow an entire ISP to opt out. ISPs are the ones who pay for the bandwidth used to transmit spam, which results in increased prices for consumers. Any proposal for spam legislation should include a provision for entire domains to opt out of spam.

  • - is not allowed to be the last letter of a domain name by RFC convention.
  • I know a number of people who are, or have been, telemarketers; apparently making one sale out of a hundred calls is good-to-average. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to say that one out of every hundred spam mails that's attended to (i.e. that goes to a working e-mail address and that isn't filtered out) would result in a sale. Anyway, if it didn't work then they wouldn't do it..

    --neil

  • The reason that (paper) junk mail and phone calls have higher hit rates is the unit cost - junk mail lists are prequalified because it's worth spending 40c per name to eliminate a no hopers from the list if the mail piece costs 60c a unit with postage. Telemarketing costs $3 a call, ditto.
    This is plausible, but I still have doubts. Example: I've never bought anything from telemarketers or from random snailmail spammers, but I still recieve telemarketer calls and snailmail spam on a daily basis. Now perhaps I didn't specify plainly enough in my original posting -- one out of every 100 spam e-mails _which gets through_ results in a sale. I haven't ever seen a list, but I'll bet that when you buy a CD with 10 million e-mail addresses on it, the majority of the addresses are duplicates, fakes, NOSPAM-munged, or addresses that aren't being actively checked any more. Also, it's much easier just to hit 'delete' as soon as you see spam than it is to ignore telemarketers or throw away snailmail. So perhaps you have to send out 10,000 e-mails if you want 100 of them to be read, and one sale to be made.

    The negative response of the public is all that is holding back the flood right now; the ultimate way to control it would be price rather than legislation - make emails cost a tenth of a cent each, and it would be enough to severely curtail spam without pricing real communication out of the market.
    Who would collect the 1/10th of a cent? Who would pay for huge mailing lists like linux-kernel or bugtraq? Would you have to pay if the message was sent and received inside a LAN (like a business or something)?

    --neil

  • Here's a way you can permanently cure your marketing droids of the urge to use spam as a marketing tool. Simply use their e-mail address as the "From" address. Strictly speaking, it's their message, so why not say it's from them? Just make sure it's their private e-mail address, because if it's their company e-mail address and you've got to look after the servers, well ...
    --
  • Well, there's 2 kinds of spam:

    Spoiled spam (the kind that went past the expiry date): the usual porn and 900 number spam. Doesn't taste good.

    Eatable spam (everything else): The spam from legit companies, etc. Even though this is still annoying, it's not the kind we complain to the FDA about.

    Either way they're not tasty. Complain to your local supermarket or the FDA as soon as you can

    *sarcasm*
  • Makeit available freely to anyone who wants it, and make it a high crime to violate it.

    You forget one small thing... Ok, let's make it a high crime in the US to send spam to addresses on this list. So the spammers start sending mail from other countries... And they get a huge list of valid addresses to send to.

    Even if you get half the world to pass these laws, what about the other half? Not to mention the countries where laws can be freely broken by anyone with enough money, and how much some countries dispise any attempt by the US to force laws on them...

    -----

  • what about .gov .edu .mil ...
  • Because it costs *them* money to send me junk mail. Also, you can normally get a legit address from junk mail, so if it bugs you enough you can at least have a reasonable chance at letting them know what a bunch of loosers they are. Also, as the article said, there are laws governing junk mail and explicit sexual material, but not spam.
  • Just tell the caller that you don't have the time to to learn more about their product, but would be more than happy to call them at their home for more details. They're usually taken aback by this, at which point you can ask "What, you mean you don't like people you don't even know calling you at home? Why not?".

    Actually, a couple of times when I've tried this, they did give me their home phone number so I could call them back later.
    What was really fun, was one person also had their home number on their web page, so a quick web search gave me all sorts of info on them.
    I think I freaked them out a bit when I knew the name of the dog I could hear barking in the background :-)
  • In the Anti-Netabuse "biz" we have several rules:

    1. Spammers are STOOOPID!
    2. If you find a smart spammer, see #1 again.
    Will we have people stupid enough to forget setting it Priority: Bulk? Is the sky blue?



    ---
    Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack

  • I know that I use spamcop and go after spammers- but at the same time I'm placed in the other position. I am a musician- I'm up against the major labels and the incredible inertia of the existing music industry in which only bands selling their CDs for $17 and seeing none of it but nevertheless _suing_ redistributors "matter". I'm trying to really _run_ with basically the open source model as applied to music- and the problem is always networking.

    And of course I never spam- I am incredibly hesitant to even use email to try to set up a relationship with a person related to what I'm doing with music or sound engineering. I wrote CmdrTaco- once- asking if he wanted me to record some special Geeks In Space music and sounds to _give_ him in hopes I might get a mention. Never heard back, never tried again- I'm deathly afraid of being thought of as spamming.

    Yet you HAVE to market- you HAVE to network, or you're dead- and my awareness of how bad spam is tends to have a profound effect on the way I network. It's like it is forcing me to evolve laborious ways of dealing with it- ways that might be the only good ways of coping with needing to market in a world where connectivity is so vast that 'spam' can mean almost anything.

    You, reading this (whoever you are) did not 'ask' to hear from me. Nobody solicited my comment on the slashdot comments page. Yet, the purpose of the thing is for me to cover Natalie Portman with hot gr^H^H^H^H^H^H to make insightful comments ;)

    As such, I find that I wait eagerly, hoping to see mp3 related Slashdot articles- because when there is one, I become relevant to the discussion, and I'm telling you, Slashdot is a powerful resource- anybody would want to have their product or service 'slashdotted' (even a free one) but the thing is, Slashdotters are so aware and even touchy about being exploited that you can't bullshit- when I get a chance, I take an _hour_ to type up the best statement of where I'm at on the subject. I put more effort into it than some article authors- I have _been_ a Slashdot article authors- I basically show my respect for the community by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am listening, am part of the community, am in a two-way communication rather than just blathering at people. Sometimes I try to sneak in geek creds and screw up- I mistook "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" for "Cryptonomicon" :)

    Because of paying attention to this, I can even make a post that says "BUY MY ALBUM!" [mp3.com] all over it in boldface all caps as an intentional parody of desperate hype- because the post _was_ a plea for help getting more respect and credibility for indie mp3-reliant artists, and thus it was on topic. (Yes, that link is real and so is the plea- see how this works? Meta-hype, but honestly I am not fooling about wishing people to buy my nice $5.99 CDs [mp3.com], but here I am talking _about_ the approaches I have to take to be certain I am not doing any variation on spamming)

    And because I am willing to be part of the discussion and talk about what I've needed to do in order to take responsibility, I can finish up my comment by just saying a little about where I'm at today- in a way it is on a personal note, but the comment is not ONLY about the personal note, it is entering the discussion about 'legitimate spam' and then allowing my 'legitimate' needs/concerns to be mentioned. Those needs are as follows- BUY MY ALBUM! AHAHAHAHAHAH! [mp3.com] *g* No, seriously... well, sure I'd like to see that happen but that's not where I put my priorities. I put giving people free downloads higher on the priority list because I am trying to prove that you _can_ succeed by applying the opensource model to music- and so, there is this specific song that I desperately want to kick ass on the mp3.com charts. That song is "Fire Dragon" [mp3.com], which you can download directly from that link without even having to log into anything or leave the slashdot page, and it's 4.7 megs, techno with an extremely high quality production (geek cred again- I physically built equipment to get the drums equalised so that the bassdrum is heavily subsonic and the snare barks really loud :) ) and is actually in 7/4 time, sort of geek techno that is slightly too intellectually demanding for the mainstream music industry :) I'm currently downloading another mp3.com artist friend's entire page for a second time because I like his music and am trying to help him in the charts- he is corruptdata [mp3.com].

    Exposure is life- and spam is worthy of the most horrible punishments, so somebody like me has a lot of work to do in order to promote. Basically I have to _be_ part of the community and be actively a part of the discussion while still trying to stand up for the things I do that I am passionate about and desperately want to tell people about :) it can feel like revolution, this being-a-mp3-artist, what with the incredible forces trying to destroy my best hope of distribution for my ART. What if they get mp3s themselves banned or made illegal somewhere? That would be restraint of trade against me, and nobody really considers that! So I keep trying to push it, trying to do this 'popularity', 'promotion' thing _knowing_ that if I manage to get that 5 minutes of fame, I will have a lot to say about the RIAA and the industry and lots of links [livedaily.com] to raise people's awareness about the abuses of the industry, and that not every mp3-using musician will be so motivated to make such statements.

    And at the same time I work just as hard to avoid even the appearance of spam, and have put a lot of effort into trying to educate other net-musicians about why spam is bad and why it makes you vulnerable to losing your account clicky clicky ;) So it's not so much a 'balance' in the sense of 'doing the right amount of spam': it's a question of finding out "When is promotion NOT spam?", realising the answer is "When it is part of a desirable dialogue", and taking the EFFORT, far more effort than it takes to talk and not listen, to be in such a dialogue and include the things that I care so much about, instead of spamming them.

    I could have posted just URLS to my stuff here and it would have taken a lot less time, and still to some extent met _my_ needs- but that to my mind would have been spam, because I would not have been listening or being part of the discussion at all. Maybe the fact that I put promo links alone will make some people feel this is still spam- I don't know. I only know that this post of mine is the best analysis I can do of what is spam and what is legitimate- and to me, it's all about whether the communication is two-way. I'll of course be reading all the followups if any, because I _do_ read Slashdot, it's not a pose or drive-by spamming of mp3 links. I think that's key- if every spammer took half an hour to talk with you about what _you_ were talking about and open a dialogue in which they could also mention their wares- there would be no spammers.

    Because what defines a spammer, in some way, is that they completely are not interested in YOU at all and are not listening at all and are entering no sort of dialogue at all. In a way, though I tolerate the ones who spend their _own_ money to do that (like flyer-printers, postal mail promo), even those are not the wave of the future, because it is meaningless- you can't distinguish yourself from anybody else that way, and there's so much noise that it all becomes meaningless. That is not only pollution, it is also _useless_...

    I really hope I do better than that. Slashdotters know me, periodically get tired of me ranting about mp3 and moderate me down to make me shut up for a bit, they can get my personal email and look at my user page and go to airwindows.com and download all the XPMs and tiles they want to prove that I make stuff for Linux- or look at the GPLed software I wrote to prove that I am a free software author (if not a good one :) ) and basically, I don't need to work too hard to seem like not an intruder. I "live here" as much as any slashdot reader.

    So if people like the idea of that kind of community or _want_ to have one of their own kicking ass on mp3.com and giving press conferences slamming hell out of the abuses of the RIAA and the industry- they can stop buying Metallica CDs for a minute, and come up with $5.99 to buy one of my albums [mp3.com] or simply take some of their time to download my latest song [mp3.com]. You wouldn't believe how helpful that can be- even a mere download, like what you would do on Napster that arguably hurts an artist, is a huge help to an independent mp3.com artist, and even if the album is only $5.99 I see more from it than the major label artists get per album (I get half) and the system for making them is really cool! You get the CD in like two-three days- it's completely press-to-order, they are geared to printing one copy of a CD and its cover to order, something that was never technically possible before! Plus I do cool covers ;) so really, you have no idea just how helpful this support would be _and_ it's damn competitive with major label ripoff! :)

    Whoa, got a little enthusiastic there ;) I'll stop before I go farther offtopic. The topic _is_ 'spam vs. promotion'. I think I just got carried away in the direction of promotion... if I only talked about that it _would_ be sort of 'essence of spam'. Thankfully, mostly I didn't :)

  • Since I mentioned 'I get half' when talking about the mp3.com stuff I thought people might want to know if I am richer than they are, considering that the music is available free. I've sold two CDs through mp3.com, and get 'payback for playback' from the downloads if they are big enough (the downloader is not billed, apparently the site fundraises for the purpose of making micropayments to artists). I've made $21.89 so far on downloads, and $5.99 through album sales, for a total of $27.88, all without once withholding free downloads of my mp3s from anyone who lives on ramen and has no money for a CD.

    _I_ am also currently living on ramen and can't afford a CD- a radio station DJ in the UK asked me to send him my CD and I couldn't because I can't afford to buy my own CD, might be able to next month tho :) so, if any of you had a particular liking for starving artists, at the moment I literally am calculating how best to ration my food for the next week :) I don't need food care packages (if I run out of coca-cola I may reconsider! ;) ) but this is just to say that YES I need the support, that's why I post these things. I'm not Lars Ulrich or any other sort of rich, and I do live what I believe- and you know, I do pretty good music really, and if any of you cable modem guys could hit me with some downloads or those of you who cashed out on the tech stock bubble could pick up some of my CDs, it would help me out a huge amount. I _do_ need the support, I admit it. I try not to be too noisy about it but I do need the support. But I won't email anybody spam to get it ;) rather starve!

  • I get 200 spams a day on one email alias from 1997.
  • The principal difficulty with most notions of regulatiing spam is that it impinges upon freedom of speech. The same pen that denies broadcasting of unsolicited advertisement also shuts down the Franklin-style pamphleteer.
    On the contrary. [Benjamin] Franklin paid for the production and distribution of his pamphlets ... in fact, he owned his own printing press. Spammers, on the other hand, come into my house (computer) and use my printing press (mail server) to print up their ads, then leave them lying around my house for me and my tenants (users) to see.

    Freedom of speech is something which exists in public forums, such as the town square. Freedom of the press is something which exists for people who own presses. Both of these are rights which protect you from the government censoring you when you're using your own resources (your voice or your press) to speak your mind. It is not "free speech" for you to come into my house without my permission and preach your doctrines; nor is it "free press" for you to use my resources to disseminate your ads. The former is trespassing and the latter is theft!

    If you want to make your words known on the Net, disseminate them in a cooperative forum such as Usenet or Freenet (under the conventions and rules of that forum), or a private forum such as Slashdot (given the owner's permission), or your own personal Web page. Don't do it by stealing from other people, which is what you're doing if you spam.

  • Those who call have the choice whether or not the take the job. People need to learn personal responsibility for their own actions.

    Either way, I try to be a bit more clever about it. They're used to getting yelled at, but not from a nice person trying to make a point.

    Just tell the caller that you don't have the time to to learn more about their product, but would be more than happy to call them at their home for more details. They're usually taken aback by this, at which point you can ask "What, you mean you don't like people you don't even know calling you at home? Why not?".

    Another fun thing to do is to ask them tons of questions and let them go through their spiel for as long as you can, and then say "no thanks" after they've wasted a half hour or so.

    I really don't mind the people so much until they start using really annoying pressure tactics, don't take "no" for an answer, or start reading from an uninspired script as soon as I answer the phone. Stupid stupid stupid.

    Yet another fun thing to do is to somehow warp the conversation so that you're trying to sell THEM on something. Say, "no thanks, but I have an opportunity for you!" and go into a big spiel about something they should buy. Have a nice lengthy script all written out if at all possible beforehand. I almost sold one soliciter on a low-cost web hosting plan that way (she took it so well, I actually ordered Caller ID from here).

    Last but not least, just ask them for their web address and state that you want to do your research. Of course, all these people care about is their commission, so they'll try to talk you out of it. One woman (working for MCI) hung up on me when I insisted that I liked to do my research first. I was even nice about it. Now, MCI has permanently lost a potential customer. Go figure.


    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
  • ---
    Those who run the business have the choice whether or not to offer that kind of job.
    ---

    Right, and I blame them too. A little further in my post, I mention that MCI lost a customer. The person they had call me only lost a single 'sale'. If I had the opportunity, I'd rather remove the idiot who thought of using telemarketing in the first place from his position than the person who made the call.

    ---
    People who take the job need the money.
    ---

    That's not an excuse.

    First, there are no shortage of "shit jobs" out there, and I doubt they pay any worse than telemarketing.

    Second, if you're not making much money, at the very least you can have respectability. Calling people up and disturbing them in their homes looking for a sale is far beneath working at McDonalds or a similar establishment - and as far as I know, _they_ are almost always hiring.

    If I wanted their service or product, I can damn well look for it myself.

    ---
    Yes, but for some strange reason you may fail to comprehend, some people find that feeding themselves and their family takes priority over that.
    ---

    This is based on the assumption that the only jobs out there are for telemarketers. I would venture a guess and say that telemarketing is a VERY small minority of the total number of jobs out there - even the low paying ones.


    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
  • Aren't there enough laws on the books not being enforced properly or doing what they were meant to? :) There's a *whole* bunch of ways to stop (or help stop) spam without losing one's ability to receive e-mail.
    • Blacklist known spammer sites. (Duh :)
    • Opt-out or complain to the uplink. When a spam arrives from a "reputable" company like Caldera, raise one hell of a stink. If it's from some fly-by-night, whine and moan at the ISP until the account's yanked. Usually only takes once.
    • Set up a junk account. Go to any of the free "can we please send you ads while you read your mail?" mail sites, like yahoo.com or netscape.com (or even the open-source free ones that thankfully don't toss ads as badly :), and use *that* address whenever registering software or handing out e-mail addresses on sites.
    The important thing to remember is these people are just as persistent as telemarketers. If you just bitch about their existence, they won't ever leave you alone. If you do something about them, they tend to leave you alone. Hanging up on a newspaper salesman (damn you, Rocky Mountain News!) tells his numebers-based machines that you just didn't want to talk to him right now, and that he should call back; maybe you'll be more receptive later, right? If you instead bark specific orders at them, like "put me on your do not call list, and never call me back," then taking legal action if they do it again, they learn real fast. I suppose it does suck that we can't really sue people for spamming us repeatedly. I think adding more laws would be a mistake, though. I don't want to get sued for sending a "hey how's it going?" message to someone I haven't heard from for a few weeks. :) And incidentally, how come the porn spams are the ones we pick on first? Which is worse? Giving somebody material to jerk off to, or a means to possibly lose lots of money? :)
  • You're missing the point, I'm afraid:
    Sure, spam wastes a little human time and effort (e.g., the amt. of time/work it takes me to hit "D"-- gotta love PINE) but not nearly so much as that glossy ad for LA CLIPS that I get twice a week--

    The end-user cost of spam is indeed low -- and that is part of the problem. You see, most non-technical people don't understand what the big fuss is about, because they delete a message or two and think that's all there is to it.

    But it's not that simple. All that effort that goes into producing and sending traditional junkmail is duplicated when sending spam. It's less effort, certainly, but it's still there. The difference is that instead of printing presses and mailmen, you've got mail servers and internet bandwidth.

    The other difference -- and this is key -- is that with snailmail, the sender pays the bills while with internet spam, your ISP pays the cost. You delete only one or two message, but if your ISP has 1000 customers, that's one or two thousand e-mails per day for your ISP.

    If there are 200 million people in the US alone, that's 200-400 million spam e-mails per day, once they all get on-line. Which will certainly tie up the bandwidth so the legitimate stuff can't get through.

    The cost of spam is real, and it is not born by those who send it.

    Why is it that we always talk about "voting with our dollars"? Hell, as a nation, we hardly bother to vote with our votes. Sure, where you put your cash makes a sort-of political statement, but actually making political statements, contacting your reps (they're nice folks, even the pig-fuckers) and voting at every freaking opportunity really does a much better job of it.

    The problem is spam is not a political issue. It is an economic one. You don't see too many politicians sending spam saying "Vote for me". Spam is almost entirely commercial advertisements -- whether for fly-by-night get-rich-quick schemes, porno sites, or (formerly) legitimate corporations.

    Contacting your representatives is fine, if you want a legal solution. But, since when do major corporations ever follow the laws, if they think they can get away with not doing so? Corporations are interested in money. Period. If they think something will impact the incoming flow of money, they're going to do anything they can to make sure that the money keeps coming.

    Letting them know that spamming people will reduce their revenue will make them think twice about using spam as a marketing tool. If enough people complain, the companies that want to stay in business will not send out spam.

  • There is no such thing as 'legit spam'. Mass e-mail should *always* be opt-in, with no exception. I consider even RedHat's famous IPO-mail back then to be spam; the proper way to do it would have been with a webpage.
  • And it costs us some of that money even if we filter it out.

    Sure, every message from *@info*.microsoft.com that goes into /dev/null through my procmail filter avoids using up disk space on my server, but it still sucks up some bandwidth. I'm paying for that bandwidth, and people upstream from me are paying for it too.
  • About 80% of my mail is spam. And it is a problem, because with some regularity I miss messages that are important among the junk. And if you use automatic mail filters, you also risk losing messages.

    If it is this bad already despite the obvious disapproval, imagine how bad it would get if this were approved of by everybody.

    The problem with E-mail advertising is that the recipient pays almost all the cost: you pay for the ISP and if ISPs have to expand because of spam, that cost needs to be passed on to you. That provides an almost unlimited economic incentive for spam.

    The commercial spam baffles me, though: companies just don't seem to get it. The more junk mail a company like CD-NOW sends me, the less likely I am ever going to buy from them again.

  • I don't know if many people here do, but a lot of people buy stuff they saw in spam. Some friends of mine who used to work at Xoom.com were actually pretty amazed at just how many people would buy that schlock.

    Oh yeah, and another note about Xoom: When you email them asking them to not send you anymore spam, they actually remove you from the list -- they don't, like I suspect a lot of companies do -- use your reply as a red flag which says, "OK, this really is a legitimate email address. Let's spam the Hell outta this guy!"

    And no, I have no affiliation with, nor even any fondness for, Xoom.com. Just had some friends who used to work there before NBCi bought 'em out.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • D'oh (Score:2)

    by Zico ( 14255 )

    Dang ït, that'll teach me to post wïthout prevïewïng. I thïnk ït's ï anyway. :/

    Cheers,
    ZïcoKnows@hotmaïl.com

  • > Obviously you don't know what are you talking about. There is not that many websites
    > that collect email addresses, yet alone the ones that got any significant mailing list.
    > Hence, it is not possible that all businesses would email to all *people* on the Web
    > at the same time.

    Obviously you didn't read. "If all the corporate websites in the world, which are currently pull media, suddenly became push media tomorrow..."

    "If" is one of those powerful words in the English language that allow one to postulate what would happen if a condition changed. The condition that would change would be that corporations that had been relying on pull based web marketting would turn around and switch completely to email.

    > I don't know how old are you, but it is ridiculous to expect that businesses
    > won't take advantage of a cheap method of directly contacting customer such as
    > Email marketing is (aka spam).

    Welcome to the internet. If you think I sound like a child, then to you I am a child. (Although that wouldn't make you very perceptive.)

    And it is perfectly reasonable to expect businesses to not take advantage of annoying methods of customer harrassment. If I do not give them the money they need to pay their bills, then obviously they are going to change their practices. We are in (pardon buzzword) the information age, and as a consequence, reputation of a company is extremely important to its success, because it's very easy to distribute bad press about a company.

    > This is one of the advantage of the "New Economy", something that can't be achieved
    > that easy and cheaply elsewhere, and now you suggesting to completely ban it. Obviously
    > there should be easy way to opt out from any mailing list

    You're thinking like an American. You cannot "ban" spam, and you cannot force companies to comply with opt-out lists. I suggest you examine the extended headers sometime of the spam you get. I live in the U.S., and almost every piece of spam I receive is routed through (or sourced from) at least one foreign country. The U.S. can pass all the laws in the world, but it can't dictate policy to the world.

    The only viable solution must be consumer oriented and initiated.
  • Not new. Been around forever, so far as I can tell; I was using this in 8.8.5, and I didn't have to configure it at all. It just works.
  • Its called a joke. Look that one up.

    And yes, i'm sure there are many secure NT servers out there. The problem is, people keep plugging them back into the wall.


    Bowie J. Poag
    Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda [unc.edu])

  • Unfortunately, there are plenty of people out there who find sending "direct mail" (aka spam) a perfectly acceptable form of product marketing. Many of them work for otherwise reputable companies.

    This is a good time to find out if YOUR company sends those nasty "direct mails" out to people. If not your company, how about companies you do business with? Many places won't care what one person thinks, but when they start to see thousands, or (if you're so lucky to work for a larger company) millions of dollars in lost revenues because of their spam they might start to listen.

    Techies like us have more influence on buying decisions and corporate policy than most people realize. Let's use it!

  • I send spam reports in about legit businesses just like I do with boiler room operations. I use Spamcop [spamcop.net] to filter my mail, and do the reporting. It makes it super easy to do.

    Sometimes it is good to follow up your spam report to the CEO of the company, like I did with Insight [insight.com] - yep the mail order company. Their marketing drone decided that there were not enough people on the mailing list, so he resubscribed EVERYONE they had an email address for (even if you chose not to receive their junk mail when you purchased something from them). So, I wrote a letter to the CEO. The next morning he sent back a message and he was none too happy about it. Not sure what happened to the marketing guy, but from the tone of the CEO's message I would not be too surprised if the guy is now looking for another job.
  • Most of the time I type in "tjiowm@gjiowm.com" as my email address, or something similar. It works like a charm.
  • You know.. everybody hates junkmail. Everybody hates spam. Even the CEO of IBM probably hates it, but why do they do it? One reason only!
    BECAUSE IT WORKS. It must work. If it doesn't lead to increased revenue, then companies wouldn't spam. So.. perhaps marketing companies/divisions are distorting their facts to show that spam works. Or perhaps a lot of people silently respond to spam.

    You know.. I have a policy. If the advertising of a company offends me, I don't buy from it, ever.

    Network Associates is one such company. They spam me. When I got a phone call (more spam, the lady was just reading off a card) I told her I would never buy anything from them, because they spammed me.

    Vote with your money people. IGNORE companies that spam. Pretend they don't exist.
  • This was tried. Congress wanted this, with regards to direct-marketing phone calls. What they got in the end was a system whereby companies themselves had to maintain their own opt-out lists. Hardly the same thing at all.

    THis is a good idea. Make a list publicly available, on the intenret, of those who's phone numbers and email addresses (and heck! snail mail addresses) do not wish to receive junk mail. Makeit available freely to anyone who wants it, and make it a high crime to violate it.

    YES!
  • because, that would introduce a weak point in the mail system. Someone could 'accidentally' get your email address into a blacklist, and you would never be able to send email, anywhere.

    A better system would be one whereby the ISP's mail server keeps a white-list of acceptable mail addresses> Any mail coming from a previously unknown address would be both indicated to you in a daily digest type messages (all messages from one day), or simply on a web page, for your later approval, and a copy would also be sent back to the originator, explaining that by sending a certain message back, they can add themeselves to your list. Also explaining how spam is not permitted, etc...
    This way, communications are not overly interrupted, and spam is completely cut out, as spammers would be consciously and blatantly violating you.
  • just this morning I received two pieces of spam, one from AT&T, hawking more gaddam 1-800-crap, and the other from BellSouth, selling (drum roll please....) e-mails addresses for dot.coms.

    I think these are good reasons to FLAME THE SHIT out of companies. At least that's what I did. If you give me your unsolicited, commercial message, I'll give you my uncensored opinion where exactly and how far up, you can stick it.

    --
  • Well sure, particularly since the one Stimpson suggests will just force US spammers out of business, creating a business opportunity for foreign spammers. As if I don't get enough unreadable (because it's in big4, or turkish, or korean) spam already.
    -russ
  • and they can get a court order to freeze the company's assets..

    And unless the foreign country recognizes the legallity of this act, it's meaningless.

  • The principal difficulty with most notions of regulatiing spam is that it impinges upon freedom of speech. The same pen that denies broadcasting of unsolicited advertisement also shuts down the Franklin-style pamphleteer. We must not, in my view, preclude people from exercising speech based upon the content of that speech, unless we are regulating a particular kind of constitutionally permissible speech (clear and present danger speech, constitutionally regulable obscenity, and other speech falling within exceptions to the first amendment, false statements). Free speech absolutists might not even want to go that far.

    One line of thinking suggests requiring the marking of broadcast unsolicited speech, to facilitate filtering. The difficulty here is that this transforms the problem of unconstitutionally prohibited speech to one of unconstitutionally compelled speech. (Imagine that Congress could pass such a law -- what would preclude it from passing a law requiring the tagging of speech containing "indecent" content, and so forth?)

    There is another way, one that does not have these constitutional infirmities: preclude FALSE tagging of the mode of distribution. In other words, make it unlawful to say that speech is NOT spam, when, in fact it is.

    How would that help? Simple. We adopt by convention a tag indicating, essentially, that "this transmission, or other transmissions substantially similar, were not distributed to more than 100 persons within the past week without their prior consent." Virtually every non-spam mail (including list service transmissions) satisfies this request. All that needs to be done is to have mail clients routinely insert the tag:

    X-DISTRIBUTION: 100, 7

    This would, however, constitute a regulable false statement by spammers. Then, individuals can determine whether to opt-in or not. The approach does have its limits, but if the law gives meaningful teeth in its enforcement (statutory damages, award of attorney fees, class action provisions), it will help to keep, at least, the legitimate entities honest, and the illegitimate ones relatively small.

    At the very least, it would impact upon the incentive to spam.
  • Requiring the labelling of goods is quite a different thing from requiring the labelling of speech. Cases addressing labelling laws make precisely this distinction.

    Time will tell whether the Washington Bill or its sisters statutes will withstand constitutional scrutiny. At least a few entities (including EFF) think they step over the line. A full discussion of the First Amendment issues is well beyond the scope of this discussion.

    Concerning the allegation of a blanket exception for commercial speech, I respond: the truth is rather more interesting.

    The same hand that would permit such regulation, permits mandatory RSACi labelling of websites. Be very careful where you draw the lines between tolerating government regulation of the speech you don't like -- they'll most certainly be coming after you next.
  • If you'd have read the headline, or even better, the article itself, it's not legitimizing spam, it's condemning spam sent by legitimate (ie. well-known) companies.

    Quoting from the article itself:

    A growing number of companies are using e-mail for direct marketing. These aren't fly-by-night spammers with get-rich-quick schemes or steaming come-ons to hot sex sites. No, these are legitimate businesses --companies that think they have the right to send me unsolicited mail simply because they have my e-mail address.

    Mr. Garfinkel agrees with you.
  • And most mailing list processors will change
    user+company@site
    to:
    user@site
    company@site
    user+company@site
    user+other@site

    So you end up with serveral times as much junk.
  • Thanks for reminind me to check my hotmail account.

    Right now thogard@hotmail.com has 672 new
    messages. Man I must have a lot of friends.
    Oh wait its all special offers.

    So it took me over 60 seconds to delete all that spam (without reading any messages becuase I don't use that mailbox) and the data transfer to do that only cost me AU$0.48

  • Hey! I just realized there's a paragraph missing from my comment! What the hell?

    I noted that the address attached to my Slashdot account, st90300@jag uar1.usouthal.edu [mailto], is public and more or less open to spammers. The interesting thing about it is that, in my Slashdot profile, I'm not trying to obscure it the way pretty much everyone else [amusingly] does -- and yet I never get any spam that is traceably from Slashdot. (Nor has anyone ever emailed me for that matter.) I think the large degree of address obfuscation here must be offputting to marketers, who must see this site as poor fodder.

    In any event, I had that in my previous comment as sort of an aside and now it's gone. What's going on here? If Slashdot comments are open to revision after posting, that is a serious issue that needs to be brought out in the open. If I had any idea that people would be able to muck around with what I was typing, I wouldn't bother to type it. I'd like an answer about this matter -- I have a hard time taking commentary seriously after realizing this can and does happen. Grrr....



  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • If there are legit, why would they want to associate themselves with the aforementioned likes of spammers? Obviously, any legit company that decides it's time to start spamming (isn't this illegal in many states anyway?) they are going to have a hard time holding on to that 'legit' qualifier.

    Any company, legit or otherwise, that stuffs my mailbox (email or otherwise) with junk, I don't support. Telephone marketers, likewise. Whose with me?!

    coolfish

  • Once upon a time, advertising used to be so cost-ineffective little more was done other than hanging a sign over one's business's door. Then some ingenious man invented the movable press. Even so, advertising wasn't that effective. There was no good way to distribute it but pay some people to pass out pamphlets on the street. It just didn't reach that many people. Newspapers became the best mode of advertising available at the time and remained so until modern postal services began: snail mail spam, originally in the form of the Sears Catalogue.

    Radio opened another door, and a much more effective one than what came before. Now the listeners were captive audiences, ie. they couldn't simply not read an ad that didn't catch their eye, or throw out the piece of junk they got in the mail. All they could do was stop listening or change the station. It was relatively cheap and could reach large audiences, and you had a good way to measure how many people were actually listening to your solicitations. Thus began the era of modern advertising.

    Television soon took over, and, while more effective than radio, was also much more expensive. It kept the system relatively clean. It still cost money to advertise, and the more effective advertising you wanted, the more you had to pay (better time slots, tv over radio, all cost more).

    And now we have email. Your email address is becoming just as easy to get nowadays as your snail mail address. It's just as effective, if not more-so, than snail-mail spam (easier access to the product if it's online), it's *CLOSE TO FREE*, and it's INSTANT (more or less). If you're sly about it, you could encode the url's in your email to query your web address and see how many people actually clicked through (instantly guaging how many people not only went for more information, but how many people actually BOUGHT the product online). It's almost the perfect medium for advertising, if people didn't hate it so much.

    What's my point? My point is, the more efficient and ubiquitous communication becomes, the more intrusive advertising can become. And that's just what spam is, in all forms: intrusive. Most people don't want to see commercials on TV, hear them on radio, get them in their mailbox OR their inbox; it's all downright intrusive. The worst case yet is starting to show, too: as email becomes even more ubiquitous, you'll start seeing more and more spam, from legit and non-legit companies alike, and it will be more and more intrusive, and eventually, given its efficiency, become THE MOST intrusive advertising delivery method in existance.

    This is why people care.

  • Spam is only effective because of the low cost to the sender. If he sends out a million or so spams and even one or two folks in the shallow end of the gene pool respond to him, he's made a profit. And of course, he can blast 'em out real fast so the folks at the RBL don't have time to detect and blacklist him before the damage is done.

    A possible solution to this would be to refuse any unencrypted E-Mail, and set your encryption key to about 4096 bits. It takes about 10 seconds on my PII 300 at work to encrypt an e-mail sized /etc/motd to a 4096 bit key. Joe Random Spammer isn't going to spend the time to encrypt to my key, he's not going to buy the computer hardware and even if he did, encrypting a million messages to a million different keys would take a significant amount of time, making spammer detection and elimination much easier. Your average spammer isn't even going to get your mail bounce with your encryption key in it.

    I suspect that by using this method, you'd cut your spam count to 0. As for mailing lists, you can poke holes in your rules for them on a case by case basis.

  • It's kind of a relief to learn that I'm not the only one who's been hearing about Benchmark's Laser Printer Toner sale for the past three years.

    - Michael

    The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
  • <NITPICK>
    Spam == Unsolicited COMMERCIAL email
    College information would hardly qualify as commercial (even though it might qualify as trash)
    </NITPICK>

    And if you get your mail adress from the college (or your employer) *they* are fully justified in sending group mail. (Terms of use etc etc)

  • Hi!

    Actually, I have not bought anything I first learned of through spam.

    But that's because the sales rep won't be here till Tuesday. Then I'm buying.

    I get spam just like anybody else. I get the photocopier toner sales, the multi-level marketing spiels, and seemingly endless variations on Neiman-Marcus cookies forwarded by Daughter #2's voice teacher. But last Friday I actually saw a useful promotion in what was unabashed B-spam (B2B-spam?).

    A local sales manager for an upstart alternative phone company named ChoiceOne B-spammed every web domain holder in his territory (the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania). This was a pretty amateur effort: he even mistyped the URL to his company's website. But the company is offering something I want--dramatically lower-cost bandwidth.

    (Digression: I'm 23,000 feet from the nearest CO, so DSL is out of the question. What this outfit (ChoiceOne--http://www.choiceonecom.com [choiceonecom.com]) is offering to do is resell a local T1 circuit to the CO, where they have a point of presence (for the DSL service they're offering in-town). This is dramatically cheaper than any other alternatives--it means that my bandwidth charges drop from $485/month for 64Kbps to $375/month for 512Kbps. This may seem overpriced to you urban cowboys, but out here in the sticks this is terrific news.)

    The rep's coming out on Tuesday. I'll visit with him, then take him up the road to visit a sometime client who also wants to sign up.

    So yes--count me as someone who has bought a service from a spammer. In my case (at least right now) it seems like too good a deal to pass up.

    John Murdoch

  • Actually, that's not true. The company faces a lawsuit in a foreign country. They either defend the lawsuit, or refuse to acknowledge another country's legal system. If they refuse, the plaintiff will likely win given that they face no opposition, and they can get a court order to freeze the company's assets...

    You can legislate in the world economy, you need to obey the laws in every country that you do business...

    Alex
  • A little further in my post, I mention that MCI lost a customer. The person they had call me only lost a single 'sale'. If I had the opportunity, I'd rather remove the idiot who thought of using telemarketing in the first place from his position than the person who made the call.

    As a former employee of MCI whose job, in part, was to bust unethical or misbehaving telemarketers, I think I can say a few things here.

    (Yes, it was a very satisfying aspect of my job!)

    First, telemarketing works. It's maybe 20x more effective than snail mail. Second, your telemarketer really didn't handle the situation very well. Every telemarketer at MCI is set up so they can instantly snail mail you information on whatever plan they happen to be offering you at the time. (Of course, you can also check out same on the web site.) And they can call you back at a later, mutually agreed upon date and time. (This saves them from losing their commission and allows people to go and do their own research.) Which, if you're interested, you'd probably want to do, since the telemarketers can offer you special deals or promotions that aren't advertised on the web site.

    But anyway, the point is telemarketing works. Far fewer people are bothered by it than spam. And oddly enough, it draws a better response than direct (snail) mail.

    Oh, yeah. If a telemarketer calls you and does anything stupid, like curse at you, hang up on you, tell you they'll give you free long distance forever, etc., call in to MCI's customer service number and report the incident. These incidents are passed up to the Customer Research department which does a preliminary investigation into the report, and sends those with merit to the National Escalation Center which is a glorified term for a large office full of HR types who decide whether to spank or fire the telemarketer. :)
    ---

  • ok... I'm sure I'll be hated for this, but... Everyone is way to uptight about it. A certian amount of "spam" is needed. But only in very select circumstances. For instance. At my college, all sorts of paper anouncements go out during the year. This includes information such as a students class schedules, and upcoming academic changes. This costs a lot in terms of money and trees. I have heard the school tried switching to e-mail based notification a while back. Students were furious at this "spam". Rumor has it that one even threatened police action. After this, the school switched back to paper. The point being, that "hot sluts for you" spam and the like is bad, but people shouldn't flip out about all spam. Unfortunatly, people treat all unsolicited e-mail as the same thing, and with the same attitude. ---Lane
  • This might be slightly off-topic, but since so many of us are plagued by spam, I should probably bring it up. I use SpamCop (http://www.spamcop.net/) to filter my e-mail, and it works very well. It's a great tool to send reports to the system administrators of systems which send out spam, and by sending spam reports you help to close down spammers' accounts.
  • This is also possible with Exim; I use it a lot now, almost every time I give out an email address I suffix it with the company I'm giving it to. (Exim also has the advantage of English-like config files that are about 8 zillion times easier to use than sendmail)

    Interestingly, I get almost no spam. I reckon this is because:
    - I don't post to USENET
    - I don't have a webpage with anything on it
    - I have .ac.uk and .org.uk addresses.
  • Sites using sendmail v8.9.x for receiving email give users the ability to have/use "plussed users" [sendmail.org]. This can allow you to tag your email address such that you can track how it proprogates among the spammers. (The sendmail page shows plusses users as an alias but it works without an alias file - at least for me.)For example, if you feel like you need to give a real email address when downloading program foo, enter

    userid+TheCompanyNameHere@your-domain.com
    or
    userid+programFoo@your-domain.com

    The message will be delivered to "userid" but can be filtered on "TheCompanyNameHere" or "programFoo". You can use this to track if/how another company gets your email address.

    S.P.A.M. - Stupid People's Advertising Methods

  • I'm with you but I know marketing people and the concept of spam is one they have a hard time with. Every time they suggest a mass emailing and I veto it (I'm IT director) it becomes clear in the ensuing conversation that spam==advertising to them. And who's against advertising?

    Remember that marketing people have trouble understanding the net and the web (few know the distinction) and see it as a crude form of television, by-and-large.

    TWW

  • Re:maybe it's time we stopped freaking out over sp (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23, 2000 @11:07AM (#1115353)
    Some reasons why I complain about spam:

    - It costs ME money. I PAY for my net connection. My snail mailbox is free. Junk that goes in there I didn't pay for. The company sending it did. Spam is like mail coming postage due. Imagine getting a flyer from your local grocery store and being REQUIRED to pay $0.50 to receive it. Spam is like that. You don't even get the choice to deny it. You are FORCED to pay for it.

    - The free aspect of it means that anyone can send it to everyone. Think about it -- I get at least two or three ads in my snail mailbox a day that are for local stores. What prevents these local stores from telling the world about themselves via snail mail? Cost. There is no real cost for spam. Now take each city with a population over 10k in America, multiply that by 3, and you can see how useless your email box will be 20 years in the future. "Would you like to download the 30,000 messages you received last night?".

    - Much spam is offensive. In real life (in the US) there are laws to prevent the mailing of smut. If you get it once and complain, that company is liable for some serious fines. Fines that the state will chage them with. You don't even have to worry about getting the smut again. But there are no such laws for spam, so if some company advertising "Boys 10 and under, star in a porno picture and make $$$" wants to advertise (from a country where this is legal) to young boys, they can without repurcussions.

    - The fact that snail mail spam is so easily traceable keeps it reasonably legit. Not so with spam.

    - And, that brings me to my last point. Most spammers DON'T want to be found out, so they CRACK servers on the internet, they DENY service, and do other nasty things so they can anonymously mail things out, and let the brunt of the attack fall on someone else.

    As you can see, spammers are nothing more than cheapass sleazeballs, willing to sell crack to 10 year old boys so they can get them into their latest pedophile picture. Disgusting.
  • "Legitimate Business Spam" is a contradiction in terms. Legitimate businesses pay their own costs; they do not foist those costs off on others. Spamming, because it forces the cost of advertisement onto the recipient and the recipient's ISP, is what in economics is called an "externality" -- a cost of doing business which is not absorbed by the party which incurs the cost, and which is thus forced on someone else without his/her consent.

    Another example of an externality is pollution. By polluting, a company may be able to do business more cheaply (because it doesn't pay to clean up its emissions) but this foists off the costs upon others, in the form of damaged property, sickened people and animals, and other losses.

    If I run a chemical company, I have no right to lower my production costs at the expense of giving you cancer or chloracne. Similarly, if I run an online business, I have no right to lower my costs of advertising by forcing you and your ISP to pay for the bandwidth and disk space incurred by my ads.

    Insofar as a chemical company is dumping PCBs in my water, making me sick or stupid [slashdot.org], that chemical company is not being a legitimate business; it is being a criminal business. Similarly, insofar as an online business is forcing its advertising costs on me, it is not a legitimate business.

  • Re:maybe it's time we stopped freaking out over sp (Score:3)

    by Darchmare ( 5387 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @05:30PM (#1115355)
    As the person at a web host (dreamhost.com) who deals with it, it does cost. Some spammers abuse our resources so much, we have no choice but to cancel their accounts (this is our policy - immediate cancellation w/o refund). Load on our servers increases, it interferes with legitimate user processes, and so on.

    The time it takes to deal with this, plus the cost of bandwidth and server load, is passed on to our customers. They pay for someone else's 'free' advertising.

    Then, there's the other side of the coin. The ISP who has to receive the spam passes on the exact same costs to _their_ customers. It's a bad thing all around, except for the spammer.

    This isn't even mentioning the time the recipient has to spend sorting through it all, the fact that children receive the exact same porn spam, that it's illegal in some places, and that it legitimizes the practice.

    In the end, these people are forging headers and are usually blatantly breaking the rules that their provider lays down. I don't have any sympathy for the creeps, and wouldn't mind if certain terrible things happen to them.


    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])

  • Re:The classic media debate, Push vs. Pull (Score:3)

    by zCyl ( 14362 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @01:52PM (#1115356)
    > What do you mean legislation isn't going to work? You can't just say that without
    > backing it up.

    *BEEP* News Flash, this just in... The world does not consist of one country. Not all companies are headquartered in the same country. No industry can be controlled by the laws of any country. I reference copyright laws of the U.S. and piracy in China. I reference crypto laws of the U.S. I reference censorship laws of the U.K. and the movement of British protest sites to other countries. I reference the DeCSS trial and the associated broadcast over Australian T.V.

    You cannot legislate a world economy.

    I didn't mention that because I assumed that was common knowledge among the Slashdot crowd.

  • "legitimate spam" ? ...uhh, no. (Score:3)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @09:35AM (#1115357) Homepage


    Quoting from the Hacker's Lexicon:

    "(...) 5. To mass-mail unrequested identical or nearly-identical email messages, particularly those containing advertising. Especially used when the mail addresses have been culled from network traffic or databases without the consent of the recipients."

    If its email, and its trying to sell me something I didnt ask for, its spam ..Regardless of its IBM or Habib's House Of Rice sending it. The phrase "legitimate spam" falls into the same category of "military intelligence" and "NT security".

    Oxymorons.


    Bowie J. Poag
    Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda [unc.edu])
  • No way! What we really need is to get even MORE FREAKED OUT over it. Spam adds about $2 - $3 a month to the cost of Internet access in the US. Wouldn't you like to save $3 a month. How about if saving that $3 meant not getting any spam?

    You've obviously never administered a mailserver. Do you now what happens when a spammer does a dictionary attack on your Sendmail box? I'll tell you. You get to spend the next twelve hours cleaning up the mess, that's what! You have hundreds of angry users calling YOU up, and bawling YOU out, because they didn't ask for this turdlet MMF scheme or PR0N in their inboxes, and don't know who to complain to (but they've got your number, sure enough). Meanwhile, you have to order more memory, install another 6Gig hard drive, and additional bandwidth, just to get things back to a usable level? Multiply that $3 per user, per month by 100,000.

    Then try to tell me not to get freaked out.

    Yeah right, "just hit delete". Try it for 100,000 users. IT DOESN'T SCALE!!!

    See, the problem with your thinking, is that you're only really thinking about you. But it's not just YOUR problem. If it takes three days to locate and disconnect an active spammer, just how many emails has he sent in that time. How many million "Just Hit Delete"s before you get the point? How many ISPs are there, passing the cost of controlling this problem along to their customers at how many millions of dollars expense?

    How 'bout a little back of the envelope calculations, here...

    Let's see, $36/year times 100,000 for a largish ISP, or $3.6 Million per ISP. OR for AOL, which gets TWICE as much spam $72/year time 15 million, (spam cost AOL $1.08 Billion? You have the gall to say JUST HIT DELETE?).

    Every spam I get will result in some luser getting whacked from the 'net. Guaranteed. No questions.
  • > You gain nothing by being rude to the caller. He/she is just someone making not much money, and will no power to make it stop.
    No, they have a moral obligation to society to get another job.

    A friend that used to work in the trama ward at the local hospital used to tell the telemarkters that he was the one that would be putting them back together if they wrecked their car on the way home and he can do his job much better if he got some sleep.

  • The only difference (Score:3)

    by B. Samedi ( 48894 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @09:25AM (#1115360)
    The only difference I've noticed between honest companies and spammers is at least the honest companies will give you a way off the list and give a valid address up front. Not much better then the spammers but every little bit helps.

  • Spam solutions (Score:3)

    by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdeversNO@SPAMcis.usouthal.edu> on Sunday April 23, 2000 @11:50AM (#1115361) Homepage Journal
    There was a really annoying wave of Motorola spam for groups based on egroups.com last week. Not that I ever enjoy spam in the first place, but this one was pretty bad: along with the flash & html embedded in it (too bad I missed that with pine, gee that woulda sucked if I had one of them fancy new mail clients hahaha) there was a disclaimer at the bottom proclaiming that "this spam is not spam according to US code X.Y.Z so long as we provide a way for you to avoid receiving any more mailings." Aside from questioning the existence of such a law in the first place (can anyone confirm that?), if the law does exist it's intolerable -- like having a law that robbery isn't robbery so long as the robber gives the victim an option of not having it happen again. Whatever.

    I've got a couple of ways to deal with spam. The first and most effective is to keep more than one email address. My main address is only available to friends, colleagues, and a mailing list or two. Another one is the "public" address, which gets used for site registrations and that sort of thing. I don't really care as much if that address gets spammed, because it's easier to ignore and filter it there. My other strategy for dealing with spam is to have a boilerplate [slab.org] ready for incoming junk mail. It's nice & lawyerly, and while I can no longer remember where I got it or whether it's actually accurate anymore (can't be bothered to check the US code), it's sufficiently intimidating that I assume it keeps at least some of the marketers away.

    It has been pointed out to me that such a strategy might be flawed, however. for one thing, spammers can easily fake the address, so the boilerplate might go to a nonexistent or innocent party. Maybe so. More importantly, marketers might see any address that sends bck a reply -- even an 'unsubscribe' request -- as being live and worth spamming more in the future. Good point. These friends tell me that it's more effective to pass along the offending message to the kind folks at nospam.org (?- i think) instead.

    Even still, sending out that boilerplate makes me feel a lot better, even if it isn't having the biggest impact. Short of carrying out my real wish (that is, to have marketing declared as a capital offense, punishable by anyone within range of the offender whether or not they are an appointed agent of the law), sending it back makes me feel a whole lot better, and I fully encourage you all to share, distribute, and use it as well...



  • Re:The only difference (Score:3)

    by DanaL ( 66515 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @09:44AM (#1115362)
    Unfortunately, a lot of them don't provide a way to differentiate between advertisements and, say, tech support or security alerts. You end up with the same problem mentioned in the article: opt out of the list (or filter the email) and you don't get the information you actually gave them your email address for.

    Some companies are good that way. When I signed up for a bunch of IBM mailing lists, they gave me several options of getting ads from "IBM's Partners", just IBM or no ads at all. That way, I get the info I want and no ads.

    I think this is a good model for other companies to follow as it is fair. Some people do want to get the spam (otherwise email advertising wouldn't work and would have died out), and they can sign up for the ads. Some of us who don't want to, don't have it.

    Dana

  • Yeah! (Score:3)

    by JordanH ( 75307 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @09:19AM (#1115363) Homepage Journal
    • or 'hot naked sluts want you' featuring 900 numbers and typos,

    CT, you've really brought up one of my pet peeves. I hate it when the 900 number have typos... uhhh, not that I ever call those things... Just checking them out so that I can collect information for my Anti-SPAM lawsuit, you see... Yeah, that's it, collecting information!


    -Jordan Henderson

  • Legitimate Spam Forms (Score:3)

    by Money__ ( 87045 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @09:42AM (#1115364)
    The things everyone finds a little frustrating is while surfing around and filling out forms, often the people end up on lists when faced with such user inrface mistakes as these:

    [ ] I would like exciting news.
    About what? When? exciting? pfffft

    [ ] I want anouncments of product updates.
    Does this mean that every time the programer farts in his code he's going to send out an update to inform me that: "wondersoft has updated 1.2.3 to 1.2.4"?

    [x] Please do not add me to the mailing list.
    OOOoooo the pre-checked box. Does unchecking it mean Yes or No? Is the list a shared user list or one way company PR newswire thing?

    I believe that if companies were more forthcoming about when and what they send to your email, people would feel less over welmed when it happens.
    ___

  • Question (Score:3)

    by SaintAlex ( 108566 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @09:24AM (#1115365)
    Serious question: Has anyone here at /. actually *ever* bought a good or service that they learned about through spam? Or, do you guys know anyone who has?



    Observe, reason, and experiment.
  • (At the risk of getting moderated bloody) Why is it that we freak out so much over spam? Yes, I recognize that some people get buried in the stuff (i.e. receive so much that it overpowers their e-mail client, or thrusts the signal-to-noise ration down into the molten mantle), but most of us (i.e. folks like me), I think, just get a couple of messages for "HOT GIRLIE GIRLS" and cheap office paper, delete them and let it go. It just seems weird that we'll seethe and holler over spam, but don't holler a peep about old-school snail junk mail, which is much more resource consumptive (printing costs, ink, paper, actual physical humans distributing each piece by hand) than spam. Sure, spam wastes a little human time and effort (e.g., the amt. of time/work it takes me to hit "D"-- gotta love PINE) but not nearly so much as that glossy ad for LA CLIPS that I get twice a week-- an add printed on dead trees by a press monitored by a human, with other humans loading in paper, and still more humans loading the printed circulars into trucks-- later, some more humans sort them, drop one in among my mail, and send a human in blue shorts and knee socks out to bring it right to my door. Once that human drops off the LA CLIPS meatspace-spam, I look at it long enough to register that I'm not interested in getting a hair-cut, then drop it in among my recycling. Later, I have to drag the pizza boxes and junk-mail out to the recycling bin at the side of my building. At the end of the week, the guy who lives on the first floor will drag that huge bin full of pizza boxes and glossy ads out to the curb, and two more humans-- dirty one with a thankless job but good pay-- will drive up in a really freaking huge truck (which runs on a fluid made of dead dinosaurs, by the way) full of pizza boxes and junk mail will ad our buildings cardboard and glossy paper to their load, and whole the whole mess down to god-knows-where, where I'm told still further humans do something clever to make it all back into more cardboard (suitable for holding pizzas) and paper (suitable for printing coupons and other junk).

    Hell, just look at all the human time I've wasted typing this up-- the time I spent outlining this mess exceeds my spam-removal time by a factor of 10, at least. It's silly. Let's just hit delete and let it go.

    (at further risk of being modified up the wazoo) Why is it that we always talk about "voting with our dollars"? Hell, as a nation, we hardly bother to vote with our votes. Sure, where you put your cash makes a sort-of political statement, but actually making political statements, contacting your reps (they're nice folks, even the pig-fuckers) and voting at every freaking opportunity really does a much better job of it.

  • Spam from clueless companies. (Score:5)

    by strredwolf ( 532 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @09:32AM (#1115367) Homepage Journal
    Simson's mostly right in showing the problem, and the shortcommings of some solutions. However, the following is *BAD*:

    Congress should order the Federal Communications Commission to create a nationwide list of people who do not wish to receive junk e-mail. Then it should target pornographers by making it a crime, with a $1,000-per-violation penalty, to send e-mail that advertises a sexually explicit Web site to any of those registered e-mail addresses. If this system works, it could then be expanded to other domains, such as "get rich quick" schemes and eventually to unsolicited advertisements of any kind.

    Why is it bad? First of all, it legitimizes opt-out lists, which is what spammers want. Not only will they think they'll be free to send us their junk, it'll cost us. We'll still be in the same situation that we are in now.

    Second, it doesn't address the potential of abuse hidden in unverified opt-in lists. To recap, verified opt-in lists send you an e-mail asking if you really want to subscribe to a list before actually subscribing. This is done no matter what method is used to subscribe. Unverified Opt-in just spams you in a haze wondering who the !)@)*#( signed you up.

    Third, it doesn't address the best current practices as subscribed in the RFC's. There are many RFC's out there dealing with spam now. I suggest everyone read them. Faqs.Org [faqs.org] has them.

    There are better ways of success. Spread the word. Remain calm. Kill spam.



    ---
    Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack

  • The classic media debate, Push vs. Pull (Score:5)

    by zCyl ( 14362 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @09:38AM (#1115368)
    Push media are media such as spam, or telemarketers, or junkmail that shove their information down your throat. Pull media are media such as a website, or a TV show, or a radio program, that you actively access.

    Most consumers usually prefer pull media because they prefer then they only access the information they want, while most businesses usually prefer push media, because then they can share their information with people that "might not know they want our product".

    The argument for corporations using push media is fatally flawed. Simply consider it as this. If all the corporate websites in the world, which are currently pull media, suddenly became push media tomorrow, the web would crash to a halt within hours.

    Why? Every corporation would email every person on the web one copy of their website. That's somewhere around 100 million or so websites times 100 million some users. In other words, approximately 10 quadrillion email messages of, let's conservatively say 1K each, or approximately 10,000 terrabytes of information sent out in one morning.

    This is obviously NOT technologically feasible, nor is it efficient, nor do I want to erase 100 million spam messages from my emailbox in the morning. Clearly pull media must become the default method of communication.

    Unfortunately, we cannot fight this with legislation (yes, if you're a U.S. politician reading this, sorry to burst your clueless little bubble). I see only two ways to fight this. One is with technology, as we have been doing with blackhole lists to filter email from senders of spam. Unfortunately, this only works against obscure porn sites and "Do YOU want to make 4 gazillion dollars from the comfort of your own home?" offers.

    For legitamite businesses we need a different approach. It is simple though, rely on capitalism to work it's magic. Boycott any company that doesn't follow two simple rules:

    1. Use pull media primarily for all customer communications.
    2. Use push media only when specifically requested by the customer.

    I already do this myself, and I urge you to do the same. As soon as it becomes "socially unacceptable" for companies to use push media, they will not do so, but it will take persistence. If you want to be helpful, bitch about how annoying spam and telemarketers are to your friends. This might sound unproductive, but it's the most beneficial thing you can do. If you complain to enough people about it, it will amplify (or seed) their dislike of it, and eventually everyone will dislike companies that spam.

    When that occurs, mission accomplished, the consumers control the communication.

  • The reason "legit spam" is worrysome... (Score:5)

    by JudgePagLIVR ( 145069 ) on Sunday April 23, 2000 @09:24AM (#1115369)

    is that in the business world, we vote with our dollars. If we receive spam from a fly-by-nighter, we just don't use their product (not that we would anyway). But what do we do when we get spam from Sony[TM]? Again, we must vote with our dollars, and make it clear that we will not buy their product until they cut out the immature marketing style.

    And that's the problem. I want to make my voice heard, but I want to buy cool, sexy tech toys even more so. I don't wanna stop buying Sony stuff. So when I see a cool company sending spam, I'm forced to choose between buying to make a political statement and buying because the product is good.

    thin is the line we tread.

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