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© 2001 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
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Last month’s article on SpamKiller was one of the most widely read, and as Program of the Month for February, one of our most zealously downloaded since we went live here at altman.com in 1995. (You can read our review of SpamKiller in our Editorial Archive, and you can download a copy from our Novasoft.) This month, we welcome guest columnist Bill Blinn, radio personality, CorelWORLD speaker, and the one who originally turned us on to SpamKiller. He turns the volume up a bit with his disdain for spammers and suggests a course of action against spam more aggressive than just killing it.
Let’s get one thing out of the way at the top: I’m totally in favor of marketing and advertising. Much of what I do involves marketing and advertising. These activities are good when they’re conducted by ethical people.
Spam is not ethical. It usually involves the use of stolen SMTP (simple mail transport protocol) services. In many cases, the offers are fraudulent, illegal, or questionable. Virtually every ISP and most Web hosting organizations have terms of service (TOS) that specify what users may not do. The TOS usually forbid spamming (either e-mail or newsgroup) and “spamvertized” Web sites. The user who violates the TOS faces loss of account and loss of Web site.
While sending spam violates virtually every Internet service provider’s TOS, it is not illegal in most jurisdictions. Where it is illegal, the law cannot reasonably be enforced.
But spammers won’t lose their accounts until you complain. Their Web sites will remain open if you remain silent. We pay for the Internet. Spammers steal from us. Stopping the vermin is up to us.
Under NO circumstances should you ever reply to a message that offers to remove you from the list. Never! You are not dealing with ethical people. You are dealing with con masters, bunko artists, and pathological liars. If you reply to a spam, you VALIDATE your address. The spammer now knows that your address is a live one. You will simply receive more spam.
Because it works. Not well, but it works. If someone has to pay to send messages, the response rate becomes very important. If you don’t have to pay to send a message—and spammers don’t because they typically steal everything they use—then the response rate doesn’t matter. If you send out 1,000,000 messages and 0.01% respond that’s 1000 orders. If you’re selling something for $20, that’s a quick $20,000 for little or no investment.
Particularly when what you sell for 20 dollars costs 20 cents to produce and 33 cents to mail (presuming you send anything at all). It’s not uncommon for spammers to send nothing at all to people who send them money. Some of the worst spammers operate “pump-and-dump” stock schemes.
The cost of spam is paid by Internet backbone operators who have to transport the junk, by ISPs who have to store it, and by consumers who have to waste their time opening it.
Education is the answer. When people understand why spam is bad and understand who they should complain to so spammers’ accounts can be found and nuked, the problem will go away. It will not be legislated away.
Some argue that the best thing we all can do is to delete or ignore it. I disagree! The way to stop this sludge is to make the spammer’s life so miserable that he or she stops. If someone sneaks up onto your porch every morning and steals your newspaper, is the best solution to just forget about it and buy another copy? I don’t think so.
If everyone simply deleted spam, eventually the network would slow to a crawl because there would be so much junk e-mail. What happens then? Well, ISPs will buy more (and faster) mail servers and better connectivity for the servers. Who will pay for this? Since nobody would be complaining, spam would continue to multiply until it clogs the new servers and connections. Educate ISPs. Educate spammers. Treat the cause, not the symptom.
Spammers are thieves, plain and simple. If even 10% of the people who received a spam tracked down the ISP the spammer used for e-mail or the Internet presence provider (IPP) for the spammer’s Web site and complained, spammers would be forced to find an easier line of work. NOTE! Since some IPPs are in cahoots with spammers, you may have to complain to the upstream provider.
It’s not rocket science. Examine the spam’s headers. Find where the message came from and complain. If there’s a Web site involved, complain. I’ve managed to get numerous e-mail accounts terminated and several Web sites shut down. This can cost the spammer some cash (besides causing orders to be lost).
If you want to see spam continue to proliferate, just ignore it. If you want it to go away, be a pain in the ass to spammers. The thieves will get away with it only as long as we allow them to.
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