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Posted on 12/09/2003 6:52:01 AM PST by commish
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:38:03 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WASHINGTON
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Yeah, like the "do not call list" became the "call for sure list" for telemarketers. And I agree that most spam comes from outside US law jurisdiction and all the spammers will do is thumb their noses at any domistic legislation. Of course, we could always turn it over to the U.N. to screw up. After all, they want to do away with gun ownership worldwide so let them do something useful for a change and get rid of spam.
First, use an e-mail program with anti-virus/firewall program that has an anti-spam feature. I use Outlook 2002 with Norton Internet Security, but there are lots of other programs out there that work just as well. And make sure you update the definitions regularly. I update mine automatically on a weekly basis. Also, when you receive spam, make sure to tell both the e-mail program and anti-virus/firewall program, that the mail is spam, so that it and similar emails are blocked in the future.
Second, set up a webmail account using a "fake name," and use that email address when trying to gain access to web sites that require an email address or when posting to a newsgroup or bulletin board or whenever else you need an email address but don't expect or want a reply. I use Hotmail and Lycos for my "fake accounts," and they are loaded with spam, whereas my primary account is virtually spam free.
Third, don't register programs or any other product that requires an e-mail address, and if you do, use your "fake" email account. Registering programs and products is nothing but a marketing scheme, which is why most of the registration forms have a line that reads something like "check here if you don't want to receive promotional and product information that we believe you might be interested in."
Fourth, if you have a personal or business website, don't link yopur e-mail address. Instead, ask people to email you at, for example, labyrinthos< at >cya.com, with instructions to insert "@" for "< at >." This should prevent webspiders and crawlers from picking up your email address. And while the dim and stupid might not be able to figure out what to do, you don't want them emailing you anyway.
Don;t know if it is the Do Not Call list or just dumb luck, but I have not had a telemarketer call in over 2 months. Before that we were getting 3-5 calls nightly at times.
I love the Do Not Call List. On our main number we've not received a solicitation call in over a month. Previously I would get between 6 and 9 a day.
Marketing is a very wealthy, lucrative business.
Just wait until the pent-up potential energy of all that money that is straining to get at you finally breaks down the "do-not-call" lists, the laws behind them, the courts, and the venal congressmen who'll betray them. They'll become "call-for-sure" lists instead, as our friend suggested upthread.
But the "can spam" legislation that Congress approved Monday requires unsolicited e-mails to include a mechanism so recipients could indicate they did not want future mass mailings. Computer users are being asked to ignore years of anti-spam training (search).
"It will require a change in behavior," acknowledged Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., one of the bill's sponsors.
The significance of these statements has not been appreciated yet by people responding to these articles, as far as I can see. Nobody gets it yet!
From the earliest days of the BBS, ancestor of the Net, there was a simple definition of spam. Anything that someone sends that is a) unsolicited and b) irrelevant and off-topic (on a board), commercial in nature, repetitive, or vile and offensive, is SPAM.
SPAM has no right to exist. People have no right to send it. They are wasting other people's server time, CPU time, resources and bandwidth. SPAM is fundamentally illegitimate.
Nobody has the right to send you unsolicited commercial pitches. Nobody.
Until now.
The legislation also will prohibit senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail from disguising their identity by using a false return address or misleading subject line, and it will prohibit senders from harvesting addresses from Web sites.
In other words, as long as the transgressor stands up and speaks his Fortune 500 name, he is washed clean by this bill. His unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE, which = SPAM) is, says Congress,.........not SPAM.
Spam has been redefined as "not SPAM", as long as it comes from supporters of the business wing of the Republican Party. Spam from "mainsleaze" spammers is now exempt, sacrosanct, privileged communication for money, and has the privilege of being delivered, unscathed by blocklists, to the millions of the unwilling.
Do you see what has been done here?
This legislation is a deliberate and premeditated betrayal of every person who uses the Net, by making his computer available to Fortune 500 advertisers -- "mainsleaze" spammers -- to invade his computer with impunity, eat up his local resources, his bandwidth, his online time. (Users in many non-North American locations still pay hourly line charges for access.)
Now, if you think about it, the dynamic financial imbalance that has driven the rise of spam has not been addressed by this bill.
E-mail is still free, so spamming will still be enormously lucrative. It will continue to bring a flood of advertising. As long as costs don't rise to the point that they begin to restrain spammer behavior, spammers will spam at frenetic levels of activity -- because it's free to them, and it's free to them because it's paid for by everyone else whose resources spammers use to deliver their spew.
The punitive measures are intended only to "sweep all the little boys off the street", as they say around the poker table, and free up some bandwidth for Madison Avenue and Wall Street. The bill doesn't ban spam, it regulates it and provides police protection and the spurious legitimation of legislation to the real offenders, the "mainsleaze" spammers from whom we will be hearing endlessly, in a rising flood of hi-gloss, fancy Mad Avenue spam.
The House voted without dissent to approve slight changes Senate lawmakers made to the legislation, which would outlaw the shadiest techniques used by the Internet's most prolific e-mailers, who send tens of millions of messages each day.
Like I said, they're leaning on the "chickenboners" to make them go away, in order to clear the decks for the REAL spammers -- the ones who are going to bury the Net, and turn it into an open sewer of 24/7 direct-marketing narrowcast advertising aimed right at our heads.
The bill would supplant tougher anti-spam laws already passed in some states, including a California law that takes effect Jan. 1.
Right. Can't have the States getting in the way! Sweep all the little boys off the street -- Big Money is coming!
The anti-spam bill encourages the Federal Trade Commission to create a do-not-spam list of e-mail addresses and includes penalties for spammers of up to five years in prison in rare circumstances. The Senate previously voted 97-0 to approve the bill.
That do-not-spam list will be broken in court, and the CD's and tapes containing those addresses will in effect become the biggest "Amazing 50-million-name Validated Address CD" ever circulated in the spamming community. Sign up for it, and then look in the mirror and call yourself "chump".
CAUCE got it right. The standard should be confirmed opt-in, or "double opt-in", for mailing lists and promotions. I'm on IBM's mailing list because I have an IBM laptop, and I have subscriptions like just about everyone else. That's all certified opt-in.
Everything else is SPAM. And spammy loves to send you UCE with a little lie at the bottom, "You have received this mailing because you subscribed/requested info/blablabla...."
You requested squat. He bought your name, and sent you spam.
Double opt-in or die. I hope the Europeans hang tough. Our guys sold out, but then I suspected that might be the case when I first heard the bill was on the desk of a Louisiana congressman.
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Fellow Freepers, I bring you bad tidings. I have just received, in my inbox, a spam from Ron Popeil. Yes, that Ron Popeil. Back from the grave of 1960's television, the Veg-O-Matic, and the Popeil Pocket Fisherman, comes the most obnoxious televison advertiser ever to exist. And now he has an email blaster. And, apparently, some kind of BBQ he is selling. The Republic is doomed.