Spam, Spam, Spam, Lawsuits and Spam....

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All reading this, I well know that this post is totally off subject WRT to DiyAudio, but none the less I feel that this information should be known to everybody using the internet and e-mail.
I caught up with a local colleague (JM) over the phone today on some servicing technical matters and then had a yarn.
It turns out that JM is being sued by a SPAMMER for lost income !.
JM got sick of junk email posted to him, and said so in a discussion group.
An organisation called SPEWS found his complaint and made the spammers address available on a list for access by service providers for blocking purposes.
This spammer was duly denied service and lost income as a result and now is suing for AUS$45,000 !!!!.
The case has been to court so far with the the result decision reserved .
"Mr McNicol has previously alleged, outside court, that internet users would have to find an alternative to email if marketing companies got the green light to send junk emails. "
My understanding is that this is a landmark test case with long term ramifications, so if there are any suitably heeled, knowlegable or connected and concerned listening here please get in touch with Jo and give suitable help and assistance.

For general knowledge are these pages -
Spam FAQ
Spam Laws

Eric.
 
About spam, what is the best advice besides changing email address:

I get porn spam, get rich spam, other sorts of spam. I don't dare the reply to them to stop because I believe things gets worse. Is the only advise to change email address?

The problem is not very big, 10-100 spam in a week. To this includes virus from M$ users.

BTW: I'm so glad I using Mac. Why? No viruses!! Yes this is true (more or less).>50000 on PC, <100 on Mac!
 
dice45 said:
Eric,
very interesting. I bookmarked the SREWS link. Me 2 is sick of junk email. :yuck:

Step one, drop AOL and MSN and pick up Yahoo. Both MSN and AOL sell your address to spammers. :eek: How do I know this? I have given my MSN email address to NO ONE, and have sent NO MESSAGES from it. I only have it so I can use MSN Messenger. Yet I recieve ~3 junk mails per day. Interestingly, both have "junkmail filters" and strict junkmail-sending policies... :yes:

Step two, watch which newsgroups you post in, and which products you register online. If you must use an email address to register a product or gain access to a web site, use your "AOL" address.... ;)

Step three, as Peranders has pointed out - don't reply to any email, as it has been demostrated time and time again that replying only exacerbates the problem. :mad:

The lawsuit reminds me of the lady who sued (and won!) McDonalds because she burned herself on the :hot: coffee she spilled in her lap.... :sigh: But I won't go into that....

Regards,

Mark Broker
 
This problem was discussed on swedish TV news tonight
(incidentally shortly before Per-Anders posted his reply
(coincidence???)). Anyway, except for discussing the problem,
rudimentary methods to minimize it etc. they reported on a
british study finding that people in Britain spend about 10%
of their working time just deleting junk mail!!! This ought to
be enough for the big companies to exercise their power to
put pressure on, hm, well .... somebody.

One never stops getting amazed about what offers one gets.
In the early days of spam mail I estimated that some 10 - 20%
of the offers were to buy CDs with lists of email addresses,
obviously not useful for anything but sending spam. :sigh:
Or can anybody explain why I, being a male living
in Sweden, would be interested in consulting a gyneacologist
in washington DC:scratch:
 
One important thin when messing in the spam fighting is that you must be sure that you are targeting the right company or person.

It is possible for a spammer to change the header of an e-mail (if you want to see it their is an option for that in most mail program)

Also most ISP and E-amil provider have a form of batch send option on their server.

For example If one company want to make a newsletter but d'ont have the bandwidth to send all those e-mail he just need to post one e-mail with all the adresses and the mail server will rout them to every adresses.

Spammer use this to hide themselve behind major ISP company.

Thats not to tell that big company d'ont use spam it's just that you need to check before acting.
 
My snail mailbox doesn't collapse under the weight of junk mail only because of postage. Wouldn't it be great if we could figure out a way to charge spamers for bothering us? I propose 0.10 to deliver from any address I have not replied to. Deducted from my bill of course.:)
 
Err, I never get spam. Don't use free webmail, simple as that. Don't install KaZaa Audio Galaxy, or just about any P2P sharing software, as that is all spyware. Same with Gator, and a million other worthless pieces of software which all report your browsing habbits and personal information. Don't ever post your email address online, on any page. If a page requires you to give out your email address, just make one up, or if it requires confirmation setup a email account just for things like that. Just about every ISP offers email addresses to it's customers, many offer webmail these days too. At the very minimum don't use Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo, MyOwnEmail. Blocking some of the more abusive TLDs such as .ru, .ja, and .ro can be helpful. And a final word of warning, don't use Outlook(or Outlook Express), or at the very minimum use windows update and make sure you always have the newest version with the latest security patches.
 
bawang said:
My spams started the moment I registered with Yahoo....... Now I'm getting around 30-40 spams per day.... Damn...

Oh! I had a Yahoo acct for a few months and never had any real trouble, and I created the acct for the explicit purpose of registering software, hardware, products, websites, etc.... I didn't use it for, like, 3 months and it was deleted. Oh well. I decided to turn off the junkmail filter on my MSN account and just let it grow.... :devilr:

spamcop.net has a tool to track the origin of junkmail by submitting the header. I don't know how well it works, but has shown interesting results for a friend in the past. It also has some interesting ideas for legislation and such, tho I'm sure most anti-spam sites have similar info.

At least the so-called virus warnings I get from my friends stopped abruptly when I replied to *everyone* on the recipient list (including all the people whose addresses hadn't been removed by the forwarding parties). Thanking "the morons" for proliferating a perfectly good hoax got me at least one ... interesting ... reply. ;) The best virus hoax parody ever: Bad Times Virus.

Happy reading!

Mark Broker
 
moses said:
You've got some broken PHP on your webpage mbroker, just to let you know :).

FTR, personal email would have been the preferred method of communication on this issue. But since it was made public, I'll reply as such so others don't send me more info on it :)

Thanks for the info, but everything comes up fine on my browser (opera 6 on Win2k). I just informed the web guy about it nonetheless. FWIW, we've been slowly reprogramming the whole thing from scratch using PHP and whatnot (that's about all I know about it - I'm "engineering," Walker is "web-dev"). In fact, we just posted the new and improved front page just last week or so. It would also appear that I have a lot of projects writing to do, too :( Hmmm... Get "GeekAmp" finished or write about it? :scratch: poo :(

Regards,

Mark Broker
 
I used to have a free account at iname which only forwarded
the mails to my real account. The reason was I wanted to keep
my real account as secret as possible to avoid spam directly to
it. This way one can change to another forwarding account
when the spam frequency gets too high. I was getting more and
more spam. Then, after some two years iname suddenly
"discovered" I was using my account as a forwarding only and
blocked it. I haven't got a single spam mail since. I guess
I will have to register a new forwarding account somewhere
to have another mail address than the real one to use in some
cases, but for the moment I am miracoulusly free from spam.
At home that is, at work this has been monster problem for
I don't know how many years.
 
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