If it would please the court, get rid of wrinkles with no injections!!
Your Honor, up to 80 peernct off on meedication only here…
On behalf of my client, I ask the Commonwealth of New York to create a new income with eBay
If there is anyone who thinks SPAM doesn’t have a cost to it, then I’d welcome them to pay my monthly bills. I run web servers and mail servers of my own why, some thing to do and I make some money from it. Most of my customers are smaller businesses and charity groups, not really the most internet savvy people but hey doesn’t mean they don’t have a right to the internet. But SPAM costs me and I have to pass that cost off otherwise I’m not going to remain in business long now am I. Now apart from running mail servers and having to spend all sorts of money to defeat SPAM, as mention before storage space and paying someone to deal with spam on a full time basis this all adds up and has to cost someone so should I be paying for someone else to get there “Penis enlargement” message across?
Now as for the prick who was busted I want him wearing his balls for earings. I am also seriously open to offers if there is anyone here who still considers SPAM to be anything other than a waste of time, money, or productivity, then you are welcome to pay the bills for me. Also if you want to know I have 9 active email accounts 6 of which I have open 24/7 and can recieve emails minute to minute. So SPAM does cost because I check every email as they come in.
In this thread I ask “How many email addresses do you have…???” to get an idea of how people deal with SPAM, anyway one of my original email addresses which has been closed for some time now, used to be a real SPAM target. Would someone like me to reopen the account and see just how much spam a deleted account will still attracts over 24 hours? That right even though the account has been deleted for years it still gets SPAM, bounced or undeliverable email messages doesn’t stop them. Might be an interesting exercise?
Have fun in the slammer, you sleazy-ass spammer.
I’m Popeye the sailor man. toot toot
Sorry, I keep hearing that every time I read this thread title, and I had to share it.
Oh yes, I forgot to think of the children. Please forgive me. :rolleyes:
AHunter3, I didn’t realize that over 1,000 pieces of spam/day was normal. I get about 4, usually less.
after listening to Binarydrone and honeydewgrrl about the tech end of things, I’m starting to see what a big problem spam is. I’m still not convinced it’s worth jail time though.
I think that part of the problem is that we are still feeling our way through what the Internet is actually like. We don’t have a lot of analogies to work with. For example, if there were a group of people that were sneaking around putting up billboards on the side of a turnpike (many of which have obscene content) and the State was having to spend billions a year to deal with this problem, we would have no issues with sending someone that we caught doing this to jail.
But the Internet somehow seems different. It is easy to forget all of the servers and people needed to make it all work. I don’t know, perhaps I am just rambling, but some thoughts none the less.
It’s not - not even close. And he needs a new e-mail address - one that he passes on only to people who he wants to contact him. Inside a couple short weeks, most of his problems would resolve themselves. For a coupla years anyway.
Horseshit. I hate Spam as much as the next guy, but that’s absurd. The simple fact is, it takes no more than a single second to delete the vast majority of Spam messages. I get probably about a couple dozen a day (and one of my accounts is our company webmaster account) and it doesn’t take me more than a couple minutes a day to deal with all of it. And the cries I’m hearing about storage space being consumed is crap, too. Disk storage is an immediately renewable resource. If you’re deleting your Spam; it’s gone. It’s not like your shuffling it off to the backroom of some harddrive to archive for all posterity. You’re deleting it. Ain’t that what you guys say you’re wasting all that time on - reading & then deleting it? So what’s up with all this supposed storage space it’s consuming?
One more thing. I spend far, far more time dealing with the unsolicited sales and informational paper literature that piles up in my mailbox here than I do with Spam. None of the resources consumed by that, unlike harddrive storage space, is renewable either (unless I throw the shit in a recycle bin, but paper with glossy color ink is more difficult recycle, too). I don’t hear anybody wanting to charge the senders of this unsolicited trash with felonies.
However, this analogy won’t hold because the folks that send junk mail pay to do so. Indeed, as I understand it, part of the reason that my postage is so low is because these folks pay enough that I am essentially subsidized. Not remotely comparable.
Well, yeah, you’re right, those folks are paying somebody to send their stuff, it ain’t you or your employer who incur great costs dealing with it. Also, orgainzations sending bulk mail get discounted rates. If they’re paying less per piece than your regular mail, then their fees are not subsidizing you.
And after that mail hits your slot at work, the costs are emminently comparable. Both it, and Spam, have no value to you or your employer; yet they consume the same resources - your time. Paper junk mail also has a physical disposal cost to your employer that Spam does not.
Finally, surely you aren’t suggesting, given your vehement opposition to Spam, that if these guys were simply willing to pay per piece to an ISP, or ICANN, or some Internet governing authority, that you’d find it acceptable, are you? After all, you’d still have to pay many of the costs associated with it - like the lost manhours that everyone is claiming are so high.
Once again, I’m certainly not defending Spammers. I’m just: a) disagreeing with the high costs stated here and saying they are not realistic for several reasons, and b) disagreeing that Spamming should be considered a felony crime because the costs aren’t as high as supposed.
This should say:
Well, yeah, you’re right, those folks are paying somebody to send their stuff, it just ain’t you, or your employer, both of whom incur great costs dealing with it.
Not true, there is a very high fixed cost to have mail delivered locally every single day. You need vehicles going from place to place every day. You need people going to every single household every day. I may get 10 pieces of real mail a month, but the postman comes every day.
Get rid of the bulk mail and there won’t be enough overall revenue to pay for all that fixed infrastructure. Bulk mail is the grease that lets the post office run smoothly, our important letters just hitch a ride. Try to send a plain jane letter through UPS for $0.39.
That may be well and good for AHunter, but what about the people who CAN’T just change their email addresses and/or keep them private?
A lot of businesses need to keep their email addresses public, for legitimate business reasons. How can potential customers contact the company via email to ask a legitimate question about the company’s product if the company hides its email address from them? A lot of professionals must kep their email addresses public for similar reasons. And public emails sooner or later become spam-magnets.
But that is a couple of minutes you shouldn’t HAVE to be spending “dealing with it”, because you didn’t request those emails, didn’t want to receive those emails, and those emails serve no legitimate business-related purpose so they shouldn’t have been sent to your business’s email address in the first place. Dealing with spam is no different from dealing with junk faxes - except that junk faxes are illegal, and THOSE laws are actually enforced. Both junk faxes and spam cost businesses money both directly (by consuming resources the business must pay for) and indirectly (by diverting workers’ time from more economically productive activities).
Only to be replaced by a new piece of spam, which is again taking up that disk space, so by deleting it you’ve gained nothing. Like the Red Queen, you’re running and running just to stay in place. You’re not making any positive gains.
Upwards of 60% of all email sent now is spam. The disk space required to deal with email and the bandwith needed to send and receive it could be 60% less if no spam was being sent. You can’t seriously believe that cutting the number of hard disks storing email and the number of routers used to deal with email traffic by 60% wouldn’t represent a non-trivial savings of money?
(Note I’m not including the funds that could be saved by not needing to hire people to write, install, and maintain spam filters - in a spam-free word, their jobs would not exist, so we’d also get additional savings in salary and benefits no longer being paid out.)
Spam is an abuse of a common societal resource - the internet - and it is perfectly legitimate for society at large to decide that the disruption spam is causing needs to be curbed and to tell spammers (via laws mandating severe fines or prison sentences) to knock it off. It’s no different than society telling someone they can’t play music at 120 decibels at 3 AM, and arresting them if they do, rather than simply telling everyone else in the neighborhood to just suck it up and buy earplugs.
Actually, if spammers (along with everybody else) had to pay a small fee to send their emails, I WOULD be fine with receiving spam. Why? Because the sheer amount of the stuff would fall off so drastically as a result; it would become a problem more akin to junk mail. Yes, it’s a bit annoying to have to sort through my paper mail every day to find the one or two “real” letters hidden amidst the adverts and the catalogs. But the signal-to-noise ratio of paper mail is much higher than it currently is for email, because advertisers sending paper mail pay the cost of the mailing and have some incentive to target their advertising to people who might actually WANT to buy their product. They can’t just send the mailings out blindly to everybody, which is what spammers do, or they’d go out of business. Charging a fee to send emails won’t get rid of the problem of spam completely, but it will reduce it to managable levels.
A couple of thoughts here. I have not found a reliable cite yet, but there are several instances that come up when Googling the phrase " bulk mail subsidizing manually sorted first-class mail." that claim this as well. I have no reason to believe that they are false, but do not know them to be reliable either.
As I understand it, though they pay less per piece of mail than I do they are required to pre sort it with bar codes and the like and so it makes it cheaper to handle for the post office than regular hand sorted first class mail. But whatever, I am not a postal worker.
So, how about this: lets dismiss the productivity loss out of hand. I am not sure that I agree with that notion, but it seems to be rather hotly contended so sure. Lets talk just psychical resources.
I (or more specifically my place of business) have not had to enter a cycle of purchasing ever-larger trashcans to deal with junk mail. Junk mail can be easily traced back to the sender, and so I have recourse for getting of their mailing list and so forth. I really don’t think that two are alike at all.
Further, I cannot recall a single instance of being sent random porn via paper junk mail, or offers to buy videos of Iraqi rape and torture or even to make my dick bigger. While there are some vague similarities (in the same way that a light bulb is similar to the sun) I just don’t see the two as analogous.
I want to ask you something, does your company provide email addresses for charity, non-profit organisations, small businesses. Most of my clients aren’t the most internet savvy people in the world. You know a lot of grand-ma, grand-pa type deals and even just people who DO NOT check their email regularly. Do you know how much spam can accumulate over weeks and months? I am not at liberty to just expunge email from someones account just because they don’t check their email all the time. You know what the means??? Immediately renewable is correct but it has to be deleted by the user. I have to store the shit so don’t fucking tell me there’s no cost and storage is BS. Next I expect you’ll be saying “well that’s the cost of doing business.” To that I can only say that I’m not in the business of Penis Enlargement. So now what do you think?
Public e-mails: my friend runs a business almost entirely on E-bay. His address is everywhere. He gets thousands of spam messages a day because spam filters would probably keep some customers’ e-mails away.
Junk mail/faxes: the key difference between these and spam is that these can be stopped. I do not get any junk mail (I had to call Canada Post and complain that the postman was ignoring my ‘No Unaddressed Mail Please’ sign, but it worked ! My mailman’s boss even called me to apologize, heh heh) and my office no longer gets junk faxes (every one comes with a number to call to get the faxes to stop).
With spam OTOH, I am led to understand, even opening an e-mail will encourage them to continue. There’s no way to stop them.
I don’t think that is what is being said. I think that they are saying that these people are upset because they are forced to sift through so much spam that it takes an hour or half the day. Before my husband installed SpamAssassin on our mail server, I was getting 500-1000 emails per day or more (those are the ones that weren’t filtered into the trash via my many client-side filters), about half of which were spam. It took many hours every day to go through all of my email, and an annoying amount of that time was spent figuring out what was spam and what wasn’t. Now, I’m sure I’ve deleted a lot of legitimate mail as spam because none of my mail is that critical so I go pretty heavy on the delete key, but if it was my job and the emails were ultra important, I would have to go through even more carefully and waste even more time before deleting things. The alternative would be time wasted tracking down accidentally deleted emails, trying to find lost information due to lost emails, etc.
Since installing SpamAssassin my daily emails are more like 300-600 or so, which is a muuuch nicer number, but I know that SpamAssassin is getting rid of some small percentage of my real emails, too.
As for the other costs… well, my husband works for an ISP and tells me the horror stories of what spam does to them. I can’t tell you how many times he’s had to go in at 3am to deal with some servers that got totally overwhelmed under an especially large avalanche of spam. Or the sheer disk volume it takes to store all that spam for hundreds of thousands of users.
Additional anecdotes: We run a very small-scale business of our own, a part of which is providing email to our hosting clients. We’ve had serious disk space issues because of people’s email accounts filling up (people who don’t check their mail enough, or who don’t delete old mail, etc.). It is to the point where we are about to add a third hard drive to our server–something we wouldn’t need to do if it weren’t for spam. It isn’t the end-user’s disk space that is costly–it’s the email providers and the ISPs that have to store the huge quantities of spam.
UncleBeer:
Horseshit yourself. At the rate I get spammed, it takes considerably more than a single second to delete the spam unless I’m content to just delete all incoming mail.
I have a choice: I can either painstaking pick through it every time I get mail (getting nauseated and infuriated just from reading the obnoxious subject lines) or I can spend up to an hour per week updating and curry-combing my spam filters. Actually the first one isn’t an option unless I turn off the “beep” that tells me I’ve got incoming mail. I need the spam to not trigger the “beep” or I’d never get any work done.
Yeah, I could move on to another email address. Like I did around 1995 when I stopped being ADHunter@aol.com and became AHunter3@aol.com instead. Like I did around 1996 when I became ahunter@earthlink.net instead. Or like I did around 1997 when I abandoned that one and became ahunter3@earthlink.net instead. Each time I moved it was to get away from the goddamn spammers.
I have a web site with my email address prominently featured – I do want people to be able to email me and correspond regarding the ideas and stuff on my site! And I don’t like to abandon email addresses that various people may have saved up from back when, or found in a archive of Info-Mac or FSA Tech Talk or WMSL-L or one of the other moderated email digests I’ve participated in over the years.
So in 1998 when the spam on my current address got intense, instead of changing address again I changed email programs, adopting Eudora precisely for its filtering powers.
Here: this is the spam that came in just during the time it took me to compose this post:
This brings up another good point that until now hasn’t been touched upon in this thread - a LOT of spam uses fraudulent headers and subject lines in an attempt to deceive the recipient into opening the email. Since when is this a legitimate advertising tactic? It makes it harder for the recipient to distinguish emails which contain product advertisements from other kinds of email, and increases the chance that important emails will be accidentally deleted because they’re mistaken for spam.
Legitimate busineses which send out advertising emails to potential customers don’t use fraudulent headers on their email, use wording on their subject line that makes it clear at a glance that the email is a product advertisement, and they provide contact information so that a person can opt out of receiving future emails from the company (and they honor that request when they receive it). Consequently, you can tell at a glance what that email is and decide quickly whether you want to read it ro toss it. Most spam does none of those things. And in many cases, the products being advertised in spam emails do not work as advertised, are illegal, or are non-existent. We have laws for paper mail that forbid such advertising, and the government is diligent about enforcing them. Why should we permit the email equivalent of mail fraud on the internet?
Man, that’s a lot of spam. I appreciate your desire to have a publically available address, but IME it helps a lot not to post it in plaintext - simple obfuscation like putting ahunter3@ZZZearthlink.net and including a note to remove the Zs would do it - avoiding spambots is absolutely crucial. Another thing is that having an address on common domains like earthlink.net opens you up to dictionary attacks - spammers know those domains are chock-full of valid email addresses and will just hammer them with random addresses in the knowledge that only 1% of them might be valid, if that.
Oh, and never, ever ever ever post on a newsgroup with an email address you care about. This is the absolute killer - I tested it on a brand new address, posted about three messages to a techie newsgroup and almost straight away was receiving spams numbering in the hundreds per day. As an example of how visible this makes you, if I google your email addy I get 76 hits from various places; this gives spambots an awfully high chance of spotting you, unfortunately.
Sorry if this is all old news; I realise you probably don’t want to change addresses again, but should you ever do so, it’s at least possible to protect yourself some more. Oh, and none of this is to say that it ain’t the spammers’ fault. I hate having to take this much care about my email addy, but it’s worth it; I don’t get more than 5-6 spams a month these days.