Tag: Spam

Over the last couple months I’ve been threatened three times with lawsuits from people who are angry that they keep receiving an e-mail newsletter that I put out weekly. The problem is, I’ve never actually e-mailed my newsletter to any of these people directly.

Rather, they are subscribed to various e-mail lists that I post the newsletter to. In each case, though, I only post the newsletter because the person who maintains and/or moderates the list has requested I do so.

But there are quite a few people who just don’t understand that distinction. Even when all e-mail that goes out from the list has the list name included in the subject line, I still get e-mail from people wondering why I’m spamming them. Some of them still don’t get it after I explain that I’m not e-mailing them directly and that if they think the newsletter is inappropriate, they should take that up with the list owner/moderator.

Pain in the neck.

Yesterday, Orbz.Org pretty much vanished off the Internet overnight after its operator claimed that he had been threatened with a lawsuit because the method that Orbz used to probe for open relays had a nasty habit of crashing Lotus Domino servers (due to a bug in the server).

Little did I know that it was my hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan, that was threatening legal action against Orbz. The city has since dropped all legal action (all it really did was send out legalese wondering what the hell Orbz was doing to their mail server), but with any luck Orbz.Org will remain down.

It is interesting that the folks at Slashdot are all pissed off at this supposedly clueless city of mine that caused what they consider to be an important part of the net to go black temporarily.

No, no, no, they’ve go it all wrong. Battle Creek was simply testing Orbz.Org’s system for any open lawsuit exploits. As soon as Orbz fixes that and tailors its network exactly to our specifications, we’ll be more than happy to take it off the list.

(If you can’t tell from that, I consider Orbz to be second only to Scientology in the list of private evils that threaten the basic functioning of the Internet. I’d rather deal with a hundred spam a day than go along with Orbz’s methods).

From a spam e-mail I received earlier today:

Are you tired of receiving emails claiming to improve your traffic?

Avoid getting ripped off and check our list of proven traffic producers. We have compiled a list of the best website promotion companies to help you. These sites have been recommended by our team of experts, successful businesses and by you our visitors.

One of the top sites even guarantees Top 10 placement on the major search engines or refunds your money in full.

Gee, I can’t imagine why I’m tired of receiving emails claiming they can improve my site traffic!

BTW, does anybody even worry about “major search engines” any more? I don’t use any search engines aside from Google and I don’t see much point in going after high rankings in non-Google search engines either (actually I never understood the obssession with a top ranking in the first place).

Editor and Publisher’s Steve Outing has a thorough article on a growing problem — spam filters that are increasingly blocking legitimate e-mail newsletters that people have signed up to receive.

For some reason I’ve been getting many copies of this spam message, which made me laugh out loud.

Natural Breast Enlargement Can Happen for You….
IT’S TRUE, tens of thousands of women now have experienced an increase of
1-2 cup sizes and 1-4 inches to their bustline using BUST PLUS all natural
breast enhancement herbal suppliments!

Now that you mention it…

David Course, Executive Editor of ZDNET’s Anchor Desk is another advocate of a pay per e-mail charge to reduce spam. Since spam persists because much of the costs of spam is shared by recipients, Course writes,

I’ve thought about this a great deal and the best solution I see is one you aren’t going to like: require e-postage for e-mail. That is, charge people on a per-message basis for the e-mail they send.

This should not be a charge large enough to give people pause, maybe a penny or even a fraction of a cent…just enough to keep people from pushing the button and sending a million “Herbal Viagra” e-mails at a whack. Make the charge high enough and all junk mail and lots of personal/business mail (like all those cc:’s you get in the office) would also go away.

The problem with this proposal is that it doesn’t appear to be serious. Would this really deter businesses from sending 1 million copies of an “Herbal Viagra” e-mail? Considering that 1 million e-mails would only cost $10,000 under this proposal, I doubt it ($10,000 is as good as free to reach 1 million people).

You would need to have a much higher tax to really discourage spamming, but the higher the tax, the more you would also discourage other traffic.

In fact it is hardly surprising that the people who would really benefit from such a system are Course’s employers ZDNET. Course notes that a penny an e-mail tax would cost ZDNET about $75,000/week. That’s a cost that ZDNET might be able to absorb, but it would bring other businesses and web sites to their knees.

Anything that raises the cost of operating on the web simply privileges existing, larger businesses over smaller, newer ones.