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THE OUTRAGE CRUSADE!

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The Outrage is going on a Crusade!

During the last year we’ve highlighted many examples of gross inequity and injustice in the world. Now it’s time to do something about one of them.

Alas, we’re not in a position to wage an effective war against many of our targets; the Trial Lawyers Association, bureaucrats, and international tyrants are, for the moment, beyond the reach of justice. We don’t care to be the Don Quixote of the Internet.

But there is a less dramatic, but very irritating problem we think we can do something about: spam. While the problem of unsolicited bulk e-mail will probably never be completely solved, we think we can, at the very least, help The Outrage readers greatly diminish spam.

As you probably know, spam is the commonly-used term to describe unsolicited bulk e-mail: those messages that fill your inbox promising get-rich-quick schemes, HOT SEX, and other irritating come-ons. Spam is most often used for commercial purposes, but also included within this category are those who add names to political or other mailing lists without the consent of the recipient.

Unlike telephone solicitations or”snail” junk mail (junk mail sent through the U.S. Postal Service), spam costs virtually nothing to send, making it ideal for those who want to reach a large audience and don’t care who they irritate. Imagine pushing a button and having a recorded message sent to one million telephones at dinner time and you’ll understand spam. (But spam is more than just an irritation — see below for more reasons to strongly oppose spam .)

Spam has always been considered a violation of Netiquette, the set of accepted standards of behavior on the World Wide Web. But there are those to whom standards and privacy means nothing.

Of course, many legitimate organizations send mass mailings. The Outrage goes to thousands of subscribers. The key difference is this: have people asked to be included on a mailing list, or is the mailing being sent to them without their consent? If the mailing is unsolicited then it’s spam.

We’ll have lots more information about spam and what you can do to prevent it once the march gets underway. Right now we’re looking for fellow crusaders:

  • If you have a special background, experience, or expertise in fighting spam;
  • If you are a software maker who produces a spam filter that effectively screens out spam without screening out solicited mail such as The Outrage. We would like to offer The Outrage readers a trial or discounted version of such software;
  • If you run an anti-spam site and would like to have it linked to from the Outrage Crusade page;
  • If you have knowledge of potential legislative or legal solutions to spam.

If you fall into any of the above categories we’d love to hear from you. E-mail editor@theoutrage.com for more information.

IF YOU DON’T ALREADY DESPISE SPAMMERS, HERE’S WHY YOU SHOULD!

Consumers hate unsolicited bulk e-mail because:

Wastes Time

1. It’s very irritating going through your mail and having to weed through and delete all the get-rich-quick, pornographic, and other offers from people who shouldn’t have your e-mail address. The most scarce resource is increasingly peoples’ time and attention — and none of us can afford to have it ripped off by spammers.

It’s Offensive

2. Quite a bit of the spam is offensive to a wide variety of people. Spam is sent to thousands, sometimes millions of people at a time. Sexual sites offering nude photos are received by nuns and children. Often profanity and obscenity is used in the subject line — making it virtually impossible to avoid.

Increases Download Time

3. If you don’t have a fast modem, or if it’s been a while since you checked your e-mail, spam can make the retrieval of e-mail a very slow and irritating process.

Slower E-mail

4. Every piece of e-mail you receive and send goes through the system more slowly because of the millions of pieces of spam choking the Internet network. Whether an e-mail message takes minutes or hours to reach its destination, it would have gotten there a little faster in a spam-free system.

Destroys Legitimate E-Mail Services

5. Services like The Outrage that send mail to subscribers may be destroyed by the rising tide of spam (See Below).

Destroy or Greatly Diminish the Net Entirely

6. Imagine what would happen if you received a piece of junk mail in your inbox from every company on earth — and the mail was sent to you every day. The only reason this does not currently happen is the restraint exercised by most business people. Sending spam costs the sender almost nothing –all they need is a list of e-mail addresses and spam software, both of which can be bought very cheaply.

It is not difficult or expensive to send spam to a million different people — and that same piece of spam could be sent every day forever — at virtually no additional cost to the sender.

There is the potential for spam to completely overwhelm the network, and for so much to end up in your mailbox as to make e-mail virtually worthless. Don’t think this is impossible — spam helped ruin many once-thriving Usenet communities. Don’t let it happen again.

Accidental Filtering

7. As Internet Service Providers try to filter spam on behalf of their customers, many legitimate messages get filtered out. An ISP will often halt all mail coming from a particular domain in order to stop spamming originating within that domain. The unfortunate side effect is legitimate email being sent from users within that domain will also be filtered out. In other words, if an ISP screens out a spammer using the juno domain, no e-mail from juno users can get to customers of that ISP.

WHY WEB PUBLISHERS HATE SPAM!

Lose Advertising

1. Most web publishers are coming to the realization that people won’t be willing to pay for content for quite some time, if ever. So, like radio and TV, publishers will be completely dependent on advertising.

But if spammers can get away with sending advertising to people who don’t want it, at no cost to the spammers, the legitimate business of selling advertising space on the web will be destroyed, or at least greatly diminished. Publishers with no market for advertising will be forced out of business.

Spamming Publishers Gain Advantage

2. An ethical publisher would never try to gain exposure or new subscribers by spamming. Unfortunately, there are many who are not ethical, and try to increase their readership by sending spam to millions of e-mail addresses. The vast majority of people are irritated by this spam. But the spammer always gains a few new subscribers.

The irritation of the vast majority causes the publisher no harm, and they pick up new subscribers at very small cost. In this way unethical publishers who violate the widely accepted rules on netiquette gain a competitive advantage over those who don’t spam.

Slows Down Mailings to Subscribers

3. Webzines like The Outrage deliver e-mail to thousands of subscribers who have signed up for such mail. If you haven’t gotten today’s DO, it’s probably on its way, but slowed down in the spam-filled network.

Crowds Mail Boxes

4. One of the most frequent complaints of web users is that their mail box is too crowded. In fact, as spam increases, it’s possible that people simply won’t be willing to dig through the huge piles of spam to retrieve mailings they have signed up for.

Must Read Spam

5. Publishers like The Outrage really value the interaction with their readers made possible by e-mail. But, without looking at the message, a publisher can not always tell whether it is from a legitimate reader or a spammer. For instance, the subject line “Hi” is often used by spammers. It is also often used by readers commenting on The Outrage. Publishers are thus forced to either ignore potential reader comments or waste valuable time sifting through spam.

This is also a very serious problem for other net businesses, especially those that provide support services. If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard back from your ISP regarding the e-mail you sent, they’re probably busy sorting through hundreds of e-mails, many of them spam.

Removal From Mailing Lists

6. Consumers can sometimes, but not always, be removed from mailing lists by inserting remove in the subject line and sending the mail back to the spammer. This does not work for publishers, who are often using e-mail aliases. For instance, when you send mail to editor@theoutrage.com it is routed to the editor’s personal e-mail box, along with other mail. Anyone with multiple e-mail addresses must go through the time-consuming task of trying to figure out which address the spam is being sent to — a sometimes impossible task. In any event, the removal option is often a scam and does not result in being removed from a mailing list.

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0 thoughts on “THE OUTRAGE CRUSADE!”

  1. It seems that when both sides are allowed to speak on this usually one-sided arguement, the individuals who favor freedom (i.e. not anti-spam supporters) win hands down. Let’s hope our government will do the right thing and legitimizes “spam.”

    This whole argument vs spam is stupid. Yes, there are people who run scams, and yes, there are people who spoof their addresses and take over mail servers, but spam is not inherently bad for ANY reason. You all submit to the corporate giants that run American’s lives for them, but when entrepeneurs try to make money you scorn them ridiculously. If spam were glossy and told you what to do, what to think, and who to be like, you would hail it as your “glamorous” culture just like you do offline in “Real Life.”

    If you don’t want e-mail sent to your address, maybe you shouldn’t publish it on boreds [sic] like this one.

    Try to force all ISP’s to require a VALID return e-mail address, then simply foreward it back to them.

    Aol is noted for this abuse, for all AOL uses they should foreward it to AOL@aol.com and also to their congressmen until something is put into law to control it.

    Another idea to fight spam: With ie4.0, you can get Outlook express as a email client it has an option to _not_ download emails that fail a filter, and
    an option to delete them off the server. Just a little idea

    Hi, I visited the theoutrage.com site. I have developed another way to stop spammers – get the majority of ISPs in this country to use the Terminated Spammer List ™, located at http://terminatedspammerlist.com. Go take a look at it and you will see how this would work.

    If you want to play around with the site, use the username “Tony”, and the password “glavin”, to get in to the member areas. This site is brand new, so don’t expect much in it yet, except for the Current Spammer List, which has about 115 spam messages.

    We do have a residual income referral fee program, thus if you manage to get ISPs to pay the $15 per month access fee, you will get $5 per month off every one. Visit the Residual Income link on the Abuse Patrol site (http://abusepatrol.com) for details.

    If you can, can you at least mention this service on your anti-spam page, and tell all Internet users to ask their ISP to use this service? This would be one way they can do someting positive about ending spam without waiting for legislation!

    Thanks.

    Joe Kamenar

    I really dislike having to clear my messages before I can actually read the mail. Only 20 will fit and sometimes I don’t even get an answer because the sender was rejected! That sucks!

    Thanks for the nice site! Well, barring any good laws to stop the spammers, the best solution short of buying an anti-spam filter program is: if they want e-mail addresses, GIVE THEM ALL THEY WANT. Munging your e-mail address on your page is a good way to stop a lot of junk out, but add a few other e-mail addresses also — a few nice ones are fraud@uspis.gov, @fraudinfo@psinet.com, @uce@ftc.gov, @postmaster@fbi.gov, @root@[127.0.0.1], @postmaster@[127.0.0.1], abuse@aol.com, abuse@hotmail.com, abuse@bigfoot.com etc. etc.

    Also make some nice links to WPoison sites–they will give thousands of bogus addresses and give THEM a headache for a change. The Bot Bait page of Yahoo has lots of good sites. Another good collection of them is at http://members.wbs.net/homepages/ h/a/k/hakata.html

    And if you’re really in a bad mood, blow off some steam by putting some of those sites up on “Free-For-All” sites where lots of spammers and spambots roam.
    One final note–most spambots run on Usenet, scavenging e-mail addresses at around 15,000 names an hour. Most just look at headers but not all. Make sure you don’t put up your real e-mail address on them or get ready for an AVALANCHE.

    An individual here says, “Do we not pay our ISP’s for mailbox space so that it CAN BE USED FOR SOMETHING?”

    Yes, I pay my ISP for mailbox space, so that I can use it for something. If you were paying for the mailbox space, you would be entitled to use it.

    If you do not understand this, stay far away from me, because I resent people who believe they are entitled to anything from me.

    Great work here, clean up the net of junk please

    To the idiot directly below, do you understand the difference between buying something and stealing it? The big advertisers you refer to below are
    supporting publishers by paying for ad space. That’s what makes publishing on the net feasible. Spammers are simply human feces who steal people’s time and attention by trying to profit at the expense of Net users.

    The entire internet is an equal opportunity advertising ground.

    I find it very interesting that the big monoliths that advertise extensively online are not criticized and put down, but small enterprising people who use an inexpensive mean of selling are so reviled….WHY is this ? Because the big boys online spend millions on advertising and aren’t easy targets for scorn ? It seems like such a stupid waste of time to go after people mass emailing. GET A LIFE instead of wasting your time on flamming mail that’s sent to you unrequested…WHAT you are doing by attacking spam is setting the stage for many many restrictions to placed on who is allowed to send email to whom….THIS is the U.S. this is the internet…..KEEP both of them free of restrictions ! PAX

    Actually, there is a very real cost to spamming. My job is to setup messaging systems for companies. It costs money, and for every bit of increased load, it costs more money, a bigger link, more or bigger servers, and a more complex infrastructure. Where does this money come from, you! E-mail has become a mission critical system. If it goes down because of overload, it costs companies profits, lost work, lost opportunities, and is embarassing. Therefore, we design a system to be able to take the load spikes easily and grow. Spam makes us raise the bar by a significant margin. That raises the costs and companies pass the costs onto the consumer and the spammers, they make money while spending very little. Their abuses are what will trigger Internet regulation and justify the Postal Service (ugh!) stepping in to start charging for delivery.

    You know, putting dissenting opinions on a backwater page is discriminatory.

    Spam is not illegal. No matter what you say, it is still a very legal form of advertising.

    1. I disagree with the programs that extract e-mail addresses. I do not think they are useful or pleasent.

    2. Many people who recieve normal “junk mail” are often on the list because they somehow got onto a professional list, not a spammer.

    3. A spammer, in all technical terms, is a person who posts more than 20 e-mails on usenet and news groups.

    4. E-mail is not illegal. The spam king was hit because he was using other peoples phone lines and other peoples ink and paper for his fax lists. There is a law against that. You cannot group faxing and e-mails together because an e-mail takes very little time, no resources (unless you count the micro-sized usage on the server which is less than minimal), and if you don’t want to see it, hit the delete key before you read it. Gee…20K e-mail (excessive) will take a few seconds on a 28.8 and nothing on 10Base2 or T ethernet.

    In conclusion, just watch what you say. The e-mail is under free speech. People are allowed to speak their mind, express their views (political or religious), and send out as many e-mails as you wish. If this was blown out of proportion (like everything in this country), you might one day only be able to send an e-mail if you first get someones permission (both professional and those micro little hellos from friends.

    Polecat

    P.S.
    The bulk e-mails are not the cause of the internet jams. Look more carefully before you post such a blatant error which is to be shown to the public.

    If you think that spam isn’t so bad (glares at a certain person on the page) then you should mosey your butt over to usenet sometime. There, you will find the _real_ cost of spam. Deja-news, the usenet archivers, estimate that about two thirds of the posts to usenet are spam. Just so you know, kids, that’s a lot. And it doesn’t just hurt bandwidth. Because of the way usenet works, every provider with a big enough newsfeed to actually draw customers, has to _store_ all that spam somewhere. And we aren’t talking about a few megabytes extra here, we’re talking _Gigabytes._

    Okay, so now it’s costing news hosts thousands of dollars (each) to actually store all this information. It doesn’t stop there, either. Since usenet is so overloaded with indiscriminate spam, usenet has become practically useless to the people that use it. It takes quite a lot of time to actually sift through it all the crap to find something vaguely resembling discussion. No one should find it surprising now, that hundreds, if not _thousands_ of these newsgroups are now abandoned by people who actually _read_ usenet. There used to be thriving communities where now there is nothing but 200 messages a week of spam.

    And it gets even worse. Last, but not least, we have the entire internet community paying for the bandwidth these suckers take up. ISP’s typically pay for bandwidth by the megabyte. (I should know, I’ve worked for one.) The cost of this, although relatively low, easily mounts as it is duplicated millions of times.

    So, doing the math, let’s say we take a _short,_ 2000 byte text message and put it in the hands of _one_ spammer. This individual will want to get his message out to as many places as possible. He will buy a list of e-mail addresses, which typically run at about 10 million addresses in length. (often more, by the spam I’ve gotten advertising such lists) My calculator, since it doesn’t hold that many digits, tells me that that number alone, is 2×10 to the power of 10. That’s about 20 Gigabytes. If that figure doesn’t seem astronomical enough to you, then consider that the same person is going to also go to usenet, and put the same message there. Now, the list will be a little shorter for this one, say, 1000 newsgroups. When we multiply 2000 by 1000, we get 2 million. So two megabytes. Sound small? Well, now we multiply that by an easy 1000 news servers, to which it is copied to. My calculator gives me 2×10 to the nith power, or about 2 gigabytes.

    So now, in total, we have one person who’s used over 22 gigabytes of bandwidth (we can’t expect the message to be exactly 2000 bytes long) for no cost to himself. In one day. Now, if we compare that to a 15 000 byte banner ad (for which the advertiser actually _pays,_ by the way, unlike e-mail spam.) which will get, if it’s lucky, 1 million hits in a MONTH, (that’s 15 gig over 30 days, or about 500 meg a day on average) and we find that our little induhvidual does a hell of a lot of damage. Now, if you simply repeat his case many times over, multiplying it by the number of junk-email messages you get every day, (I get about six, but my site filters rogue sites) and the numbers get even bigger. Now who’s using more bandwidth?

    I am getting loads of sexually explicit Email through AOL. While I am convinved their CEO Steve Case means well, complaining to him (and his employees whose jobs it is to track these uncultured non anially retentive people down) seems to make it worse. Does anyone have any suggestions? I would be open to just about anything that would work. These damned messages seem to be from a small group of about 4 different sites, as the more you complain the more you are sent. If anyone doubts this, I would be most happy to foreward ALL of it to them.

    Respectfully submitted,

    Dan E. Hubbell
    http://www.webspawner.com/users/StateParole

    Not that I would ever do such a thing but…

    When the spammer has a mail drop address for you to send your money to you can always stop at an internet catalog center and fill the clown’s mailbox with hundreds of unwanted catalogs.

    I like your thoughts on supporting changes to US legislation, including writing to your congressman. My problem is how do I tell the US politicians that I want the law passed? ALL the spam I get here in Australia comes from the US! Most of it is companies offering me spam schemes 🙁

    Sorry, I don’t feel safe publishing my real email address here!

    That’s funney…..I haven’t recieved ANY spam. What am I doing wrong?

    Time: 10/3/97 (11:43:34)

    Here is a web site that should just about sum the whole thing up. (If the anti-spammers want to face reality, that is).
    http://www.intraday.com/spam/spam/ spam/spam.html

    Time: 9/30/97 (23:43:58)

    I think this site has an idea that should be a lot of fun if you have the time to follow it up: http://www.snark.com/e-mail/

    Time: 9/26/97 (12:7:51)

    Mr. Cummings,

    I believe your concerns about pornography are very valid. In fact, I believe so strongly against sending porn by email, I turn everyone in that sends it to me. By the way, it is illegal to send pornographic ads. Most don’t have real return addresses, but they must put their web page in the ad somewhere.

    And there are filters you can get if you don’t want this or any kind of unsolicited email. If you have children, then it is parents responsibility to filter what they can get by email.

    Why wouldn’t they want to? They put ratings on movies and books, just for this purpose. There are even warnings on some music because of it’s content. It’s no greater burden to put simple junk email filters on your system.

    Another thing, every bulk-friendly ISP I know of, without fail, absolutely forbids using their services to send porn, hate mail, or anything else it deems illegal. So, it may not be as hard as you think to eventually stop most of this smut from getting into our email.

    You may ask, why should I have to go to the trouble of complaining, and filtering my email, or censoring what my children see. Well, it’s all about choices. Some people want junk email. More than you are being led to believe, according to recent polls.

    Now shouldn’t we have the right to receive whatever we want in our own email boxes as long as it’s not illegal? And the only way to keep from infringing on the rights of others by banning junk email completely, is to take some responsibility and filter your email.

    Otherwise you have a group of people who think they speak for everyone, telling us what we can and cannot do. When this kind of blanket legislation starts happening, it’s not long before something you like, or are involved in, gets banned.

    It should always be the end-users choice of whether he wants to receive unsolicited email or not. If you choose not to receive it, you must take action to prevent it from getting to you. That’s just the way it is when you put up an email address in a public domain. The same is true for regular postal junk mail. You cannot ban it all.

    We have a free-enterprise system that will not allow that. So, you have to inform the Post office that you do not wish to receive that kind of advertising in your mail.

    And I tell you what, if I were paying by the minute for my ISP, and I didn’t want to put filters on my system, then I better make sure I downloaded more often. If I couldn’t do this, or I was just annoyed by getting the junk email, then I would put a filter on. It’s a whole lot easier to just filter it all then it is to respond to all the remove lists, or to complain to and bomb everyone in the headers
    .

    Time: 9/25/97 (13:20:22)

    Mr. Parker,

    I believe you may be overlooking one extremely important aspect about junk mail.

    Please keep in mind that a tremendous amount of junk mail is pornographic in nature.

    I receive a LOT of junk mail, for instance, advertising phone sex, live interactive sex, and things along those lines.

    People who send out pornographic junk mail do so randomly. They have no idea who, exactly, they are sending it to. They just send.

    This means underage computer users are HIGHLY likely to receive pornographic junk mail.

    Most parents don’t screen their children’s e-mail. Whether they should are not is an argument you’d have to take up with parents.

    But there is currently NO WAY to PREVENT pornographic junk mail from arriving in the e-mailboxes of minors.

    There SHOULD be. HOW it can be prevented is a difficult question to answer.

    The most obvious answer is to make it illegal to distribute pornographic e-mail to anyone 18 years of age or younger.

    But THEN, the question is: How do you ENFORCE such legislation? And where does the money come from to pay people to enforce such legislation?

    THIS is why a great deal of people are outraged.

    Also, keep in mind that many people use regular on-line services such as AOL or even Prodigy, and for various reasons, they opt NOT to have an Unlimited plan.

    Since their time is limited, this means it costs them MONEY to download all of their e-mail.

    It’s very common for someone to go away for the weekend, come home, download their e-mail and find 25, 50, 75, even 100 pieces of junk mail.

    It takes TIME to download 100 pieces of junk mail, and as you know, time is MONEY.

    It is illegal to send junk faxes. Why shouldn’t junk e-mail be made illegal, especially the pornographic stuff?

    I am not a parent. But if I had a young boy or girl, and they had an e-mail account, I’d be very concerned about them receiving pornographic e-mail.

    *I* should be the one teaching my children about the birds and the bees…not the junk mailers.

    C. E. Cummings

    Time: 9/25/97 (8:55:59)

    I know I’ll be flamed royal for posting this, but I have to voice my opinion on an issue that seems to always be rather one-sided and narrow-minded.

    It’s kind of interesting, but the whole attack on bulk email is really motivated by two different groups of people. One group is smart but prideful, and the other group is greedy. Both of them use illogical arguments against bulk email!

    The first group is the segment of cranky but usually smart people who think that advertising on the net is morally wrong. Some people are so vehement about bulk email that they will intentionally commit illegal, fraudulent, and criminal acts just to get back at someone who sent the ONE message!

    They may break into your server, send huge mail bombs, etc. These people are mostly very self-deluded. They are wasting their time and energy, and will probably fail in life if they don’t change their outlook.

    This reminds me of the e-mailing list in college. Every once in a great while, someone would post a really off-topic message, and then FIFTY PEOPLE would post flames back (to the entire group, of course, and the flames were just as non-topical but more annoying!)

    The second group of anti-bulkers are major advertisers such as search engines, link exchange, AOL, etc. Obviously, their position is economic! Bulk email is cheap.

    Unfortunately, some of the bulk email I receive is lame. Some of it, however, is really good! The fact of the matter is that the net is a very competitive publishing industry. Actually, ALMOST EVERY BUSINESS CAN BENEFIT FROM BULK MAIL. Only a narrow margin of advertisers and cranky people will be hurt by it!

    Actually, many myopic anti-spammers claim that bulk email consumes people’s resources. What a load of bunk! Compare bulk email to normal SNAIL MAIL. The average incoming mailbox can hold the equivalent of a small post office full of printed letters! Bulk email is enviro-friendly, dependable, and inexpensive.

    Do we not pay our ISP’s for mailbox space so that it CAN BE USED FOR SOMETHING?

    As for the bandwidth concern, this is another argument designed by FACT-FREE individuals. If you think bulk email sucks bandwidth, maybe you have not noticed the 7k graphic banners that are downloaded to your browser EVRY TIME YOU GO TO MOST SEARCH ENGINES AND WEB SITE! (Like the one
    on this page for instance. And no, I am not upset about banners, in fact, I use them all the time!)

    You think those banners don’t use bandwidth? Infoseek alone sells half-a-million banner impressions each month! And every banner takes up to 10k of bandwidth each time you see it!

    Banner ads probably take up many times the bandwidth of “text only” email messages.

    Another stupid justification is that people “chose” to visit the web site, so it’s more ok to use banner ads than unsolicited email. Really? I don’t remember typing in “www.coolsite.com/many-banner-advertisements!” The fact of the matter is that BOTH are valid ways of advertising and creating publicity. I have found out about many valuable products through bulk email, and I like getting it!

    I am not defending people who send dumb chain letters, scams, and who don’t use valid return addresses and removal lists. But I AM defending peoples choices! It should always be the end-users choice of what they want to receive in their email box. Not some agency or group of people who think they speak for everyone.

    If the right kind of regulation was put into place, it could easily be controlled by requiring a key word in the subject area, and simply filtering the email.

    Time: 9/17/97 (8:52:36)

    I would love to see a class action suit against all these really huge spam outfits.

    I’m surprised that companies like AOL and Compuserve haven’t gone after them already!

    Time: 9/12/97 (11:41:18)

    Idea: for those of us who aren’t faced with the problem of not being able to identify the sender, simply reply with an attachment…say, a four-meg jpeg of your thumb…and fill up their quota, making them a pain in the neck to their isp?

    Reply

  2. I do not want to see the internet regulated by the government by any means.
    Once you allow these bozos to get their fingers in the pot
    the internet will be as worthless as are all the national news
    papers and the tv news media’s. As far as spammers are concerned
    they just need to set up a system that can tell if the reader
    replyed or not. Once their automailer sees that the reader
    is not interested than the e-mail address needs to be extracted
    from their database. I think cooperation between junk mailer and
    the end reader is the way to go. Regulations are OUT!!

    Thanks

    Reply

  3. I work for an ISP somewhere on the East Coast of the US.

    We get 100’s of complaints daily from businesses as well as normal customers (yourselves) about the amount of spam, junk email, trash, whatever you wish to call it.

    It causes our mail servers to back up, lag our system, and causes customers to call in complaining that they can’t get their email because the system is bogged down.

    This causes a lot of problems for us as a business. We can loose customers because they feel our system sucks, when it actually isn’t. We have the choice to either A. Block the site it came from (if it even exists), which could block you from sending mail to our server if you are on the same domain as the spammer. Or B. Sit back and let you get spammed to death.

    Your choice.
    Personally I have been spammed enough by the Porn sites, credit card offers, get rich quick schemes, etc that I have 2 accounts. One I use for personal email, and 2 I use to post on the USENET, etc. That way, you can send all the junk mail to that account and I go in once every 2 days and just delete the file. But not everyone has that luxury.

    Here is a couple anti spam tips.

    1. Anytime you go to a web site and subscribe to something or buy something, and they ask you if they can use your name to send you information on other products services, etc. say NO!. often these people you are buying from sell your email address to someone else causing you to get junk mail.

    2. Never use your actual email address in IRC, chatrooms, or usenet. (I know you have heard this before).

    3. Ask your ISP to set their mail server to NO RELAY. This stops the wonderful spammers from sending email to you using your ISP’s mail server. (If enough ISP’s do it, the spammers will have a harder time being anonymous from where they send their junk from)

    For those of you who don’t want any government regulation of the net, consider this.

    We are a world community. Once people get tired enough of the spam, they will go to their government representives and regulations will be passed to control these problems. It may not be today, or tomorrow, or even next year. but the regulations are coming. so you have a choice. start a private network of your own and stay off the internet, or deal with it.

    Reply

  4. http://www.blighty.com/products/spade/

    I use Sam Spade (sWINdle 95/98) to track spammers. It is free and I’ve had pretty good luck with it. To date my best track was being able to get the spammer’s home phone with bits of info I got online. The guy was a little confused when I called that line up asking for more info on making lots and lots of money. He got mad when I told him his home address and not his PO Box number. But what really got his goat was that I kept calling back to remind him I don’t like spam. You never know how smart, or crazy, the people you spam are. God bless pay phones and calling cards.

    To the sdaehtihs who say spam isn’t bad, and that there are people who want it, you are full of it. With logic like that we could solve the whole problem in a month or less. Simple stop spamming people. Put up banners everywhere for “Spam Mailing List” that people would have to subscribe to, and do a reply to before getting on the list. That way, anyone who was stupid enought to want it could very well get it. And the rest of us would be happier.

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  5. I would be most grateful if the “spam haters” among you out there would PLEASE STOP sending me YOUR OWN spam, in which you so graciously offer me information on how to get rid of it. Sheeesh! I must admit, though, that I do get a kick out of reading all the b.s. about how much you hate spam and how glad you’ll be to help me get rid of it if I’ll just give you some personal information about myself. KMA!

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  6. A very good (and free) resource for dealing with spam is located at http://www.julianhaight.com/spamcop/ on the Internet. This is a facility that automatically deciphers the spam message headers, tracks down the sender (even when the headers contain phony information), and reports the culprit to the proper Internet authority (which will usually cancel the spam sender’s account).

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  8. There is one sure fire way to put commercial spammers out of business. I’ve been doing this for quite some time with flyers and those annoying adds under my windshield wiper at the mall. Contact the advertisers that pay the spammers to promote their business. Simply let them know that you and your friends, and family will not buy their products specifically because it’s being promoted with spam. These companies are a spammers livelihood, and spam is still here purely because we are stupidly responding to it. If spam sells products, it will never go away.

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  9. God bless you all!
    Myself, I like the idea of Mass E-mailing.
    I have heard the complaints and profanity from the “supposed” Spam Haters.
    One thing that kind of tickles me is the notion that their day is so Jam-Packed full of events that they just don’t have time to empty their E-mails. Yeah I can just see it, the person spends 40% of their day just goofing off already, so obviously there is no extra time.

    And as far as the “cost” goes….WHAT COST????? What about just the cost of keeping the complainers in Donuts and BigMacs, is that really justified either?!?!?

    And of course we have the issue of simply “Freedom”.
    We have the right of communicating with others.
    If people don’t like communicating, then maybe they should find out what their problem is and cure it, maybe auditing would help.

    Also, you people that complain about Bulk E-mailing, should be made aware of the fact that you have been made to feel the way you do by the people that want to be the only ones that can use the internet for advertising.

    This is how you should look at it:
    Life and Beauty is enhanced and more enabled with patience and grace.

    Practice and learn patience, and, practice and grow in grace.
    WORLDWIDE CORNUCOPIA!!!!!!

    Reply

  10. Another approach is to forward the message to WEBMASTER” at the e-mail address, e.g. webmaster@att.net.

    Ask to be deleted from the mailings in the future.

    Also, sue in small claims court for damages in the amount of $10.00 if you can identify the spammer. The spammer will never show, it costs more to travel to the court than it appears worth.

    When every person who is spammed doesthis, and then starts a class action suit to recover the default judgements, guess what happens?

    Dave

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  11. I tried to read about the guy who got a spammer angry – where the spammer sent him thousands of messages, and had him subscribed to endless mailing lists, etc, His site was blocked. I wonder why…

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  13. You all have too much time on your hands. The delete button is there for a reason. use it!maybe you all WOULD LIKE ME TO CALL YOU AT DINNER TIME INSTEAD. Live on spammers…

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  14. I receive at least 30 spam emails a night at home (courtesy of the inaction at Erols), but have never received any at work… until today. I have never tried to do anything about it before, because I thought that the effort would be fruitless. When I received the spam at work today, I decided to reply. Here is the text of my response:
    “Spam me again and I will #@&* with your web site and email anyway I can!

    Unsolicited email ads to email addresses at this domain are strictly forbidden!

    All SPAMMERS are the same – you may as well be selling PORN as far as I am concerned!

    DON’T DO IT AGAIN

    IF I FIND OUT WHO SOLD OUR ADDRESSES TO YOU THEY WILL GET THE SAME WARNING”

    This bold response precipitated a telephone call from the president of the company represented in the ad (I copied him on the email) within 5 minutes of my reply. He actually apologized! He said that this was the first response that his company had received. He further explained that he had been talked into this advertising campaign by a company that specializes in SPAM and that it cost him $5,000. He apologized again, said that our company would be taken off his list and that his SPAM-Master would hear about it.

    Lessons learned:
    1. I call it “W Diplomacy”. When you call it the Axis of Evil and you name names, it shakes things up a bit. I used a little “W Diplomacy” and got an immediate reaction.
    2. It’s not always the company itself that is sending the SPAM. If you let the company know what you think of their advertising methods, you just may get your point across.

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  15. I had an email address I posted on the Internet for the convenience of my site’s visitors…and it quickly became spam-meat by those who use spider programs to suck up email addresses. So now every time someone spams that account, I post *their* address(es) on the Net…including the “remove” and “send me more info” ones. I have only received one complaint…from an individual whose address was contained in no less than a dozen emails received over a two-day span.

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  16. I’m so sick of the way commerical people think that we need to see women and men turned on by spam then IM OUTRAGED!!!It is so degrading to women and men to put them selves up for such a product. Which may I add the FREAKIN’ PRODUCT COST $0.99!!

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  17. What spammers send is all garbage. They are hypocrites as well; their whining about
    ‘rights’, ‘first amendment’
    ‘ free speech’ is sickening, as if they really care about civil rights and as if THEY are victims! Only opt-in is acceptable, that is really the people’s choice. They say: use delete. Yes, if only we could delete the spammers themselves. One day we may get 100 messages, 95 spams, 5 legitimate ones, if it is not stopped. Delete away, day after day! They use false addresses. They sell addresses from people who want to opt out to other spammers. They abuse addresses from decent users they obtained to send their rubbish. One day I got a number of Undeliverable messages. They were spam, advertising spam software and used my e-mail address! To hell with this scum! May their computers crash forever!
    At least, spam is going to banned in the EU soon.

    Reply

  18. I am so happy there is someone out there who is as outraged as I am regarding being SPAMMED to death. I love this site. By the way, another way to fight it – after trying to report the SPAM to no effect, I clicked on the website within the SPAM and found a form to fill out and submit. So I filled it out with a bunch of garbage like Name: None of Your Business Address: stop spamming me, et cetera and hit submit. Then I hit “back” and then “submit” again. And again. And again. And I will keep doing it every time I get fifteen minutes here and there because they offer absolutely no way to contact them or the person who originally sent the mail (webmaster, postmaster, info, etc all do not work). Maybe they won’t learn their lesson but it’s certain to aggravate someone in that disreputable company as much as their mail aggravated me.

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  19. I hate spam, but I really don’t want any laws against it. Why? Because, um…well…ug…because why make laws? Suppose the EU bans Spam, then spammers could live in the US and spam there, and not break the law. If it is banned in the US, they’ll live in the EU and spam there. If both countries are banned, they’ll go live in a country where there is no legsastion on spam, and spam there!

    Of course, it is kinda stupid worrying about spam in the first place. For one thing, spam do cost money, and space, and inconvicne, but should we worry more about poverty, not about spam? For the person poor has no food, no water, and may die because he can’t afford it. Will spam kill a person?(i mean litteraly.)

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  20. Best thing I know to do to spammers is find a spammers email address that doesn’t bounce back as undeliverable and forward all your spam to there!

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  21. Try setting your outlook setting to look for words like unsub, unsubcribe, subscribe, ect…It takes the number of messages from 250 to like five. I just have to defrag a little more than usual.

    If you subcribe to newsletters & the lot, simply create another folder & set the settings to copy the ones that you do want to that folder.

    Ya know it’s too bad that we just cant subcribe them to each other.

    Reply

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