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Happy New Year for Spammers | 7 comments (7 topical) | Post A Comment
Street Justice For Spammers...[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#7)
by Tim on Thu Jan 29, 2004 at 10:24:25 PM PDT

I get about 500 e-mails a day currently. To some, that's a lot. To others, including a few friends of mine, that's merely a drop in the bucket. Most of it is spam. Everyone reading this can relate to that. And how exactly do you get off the lists of the spammers? You can't. Not with a 100% level of confidence, anyway. Because clicking a link to unsubscribe or remove yourself actually serves as a raised hand that says, "Hey, I'm a live e-mail address. Whatever you send to my address won't go into the abyss. Send me whatever you have." Cynical? Yes. But, it's realistic. I gotta admit... I don't know how to solve the problem. But, I have a very strong feeling that the Can Spam law won't do it. If there were only a way to charge a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny for each e-mail sent. For most users, the cost could be absorbed by the ISPs (or, more realistically, passed on to subscribers without any real impact to the retention of the ISP's subscriber/customer base). But, for the 180 MAJOR spammers, it'd hurt 'em right in the pocketbook since I doubt their conversion ratios would justify the expense. Just a thought... Tim
:-)
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They really don't care![ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#8)
by rubicat on Wed Feb 04, 2004 at 10:12:51 AM PDT

I have read a lot in anti-SPAM discussion groups about the fact that if someone uses a spammer's opt-out or list removal mechanism, that this shows them that your address is a "live address." While I agree that one shouldn't use these removal procedures, it is because they usually are meaningless and don't actually remove you from anything. I don't think that spammers really care if the addresses in their list are good (live) or not. The modus operandi of most spammers is quantity not quality. It cost them next to nothing to send out millions of e-mails. They don't care whether some of them go through or not. A case in point: According to my mail server logs, an address that I deleted almost 6 years ago due to excessive spam, still gets about 40-60 inbound messages a day (which are bounced during the SMTP transaction). So the spammers haven't cared that this is not a "live" address, but has in fact been quite dead for almost 6 years.

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Happy New Year for Spammers | 7 comments (7 topical) | Post A Comment
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