SCN: Spam

Wed Nov 8 12:55:55 PST 2000

x-no-archive: yes

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(Ed Foster, InfoWorld)---Opting out of spam has never worked, but 
readers say it's getting harder to report spam abuse to the 
spammers' service providers. These readers say the service 
providers seem to agree with the spammers' point of view.  

Rule No. 1 of spam management is never to directly respond to a 
piece of junk e-mail asking to be removed or unsubscribed. 
Identifying your e-mail address as one that is active -- and one 
where unsolicited messages get read down to the removal 
instructions -- begs for more spam. Instead, report unsolicited 
commercial e-mail to the postmasters or abuse departments of the 
ISPs that were used to transmit it.  

One thing I'm seeing in the spam that readers forward me, however, 
is that Internet companies increasingly are taking the spammer's 
word over the word of those reporting the abuse. Even when 
presented with evidence to the contrary, the ISPs insist you must 
have opted in for the mail.  

One reader struggled in vain to convince officials of Doubleclick's 
Dartmail service that one of its clients had spammed him, even 
though the receiving address was one his company used only as a 
"mailto:" address for forms. "You know it was bad enough with 
classic spam," he wrote me after being told that Dartmail's clients 
are required to use opt-in lists. "Now they pretend that you have 
opted in and convince your ISPs that they are blameless and it is 
somehow your fault."  

Another reader forwarded a reply he received from a viral marketing 
Web site after he complained to them about one of its users 
promoting the services via spam. The viral marketing firm (which we 
won't name because the employees probably enjoy the publicity) 
admitted its user had gotten his mailing list from a notorious bulk e-
mailer, but then went on to scold the reader for his abuse report. 
"Please contact the [bulk e-mail] list owners to get your e-mail 
address removed," wrote the viral marketing Web site's 
administrator. "I'm guessing you have gotten a lot of unwanted mail, 
but maybe you should work on contacting people to find out their 
source before going off. This method [of reporting spam abuse] just 
patches problems, it doesn't fix them."  

Part of the dilemma in reporting spam abuse is that it's getting more 
difficult to tell the legitimate Internet services from the sleazier dot-
coms because they all use the same marketing tactics. When the 
Microsofts and AOLs keep looking for excuses to spam customers 
who've tried to opt out, when an IBM starts using viral marketing 
tactics, or when an Amazon.com structures its privacy policy to 
make sure it can sell your personal information to anyone it 
chooses, who is to say which Internet entities are legitimate and 
which aren't? Not knowing who to trust makes it harder to report a 
spammer to its service providers.  

That's particularly true if the service provider demands even more 
information about you to accept your abuse report. One reader who 
was getting a lot of junk e-mail with excite.com addresses tried to 
follow the reporting procedures outlined on Excite's Web site. 
"There is a page that says if one knows of abuse, they are to send e-
mail to abuse.support at excitecorp.com," the reader wrote. "When 
one does this, two things immediately happen: The amount of 
spamming triples from five messages a day to 15 and you get a 
standard response back sending you to www.excite.com/feedback." 
But that Web page, the reader discovered, requires the abuse 
complainer to fill out a form with more personal information, 
including the Excite member's name. There's a marketing tactic for 
the new millennium: Join our service now, and maybe we'll ask our 
members to stop spamming you.  

Naturally, the real outlaw types on the Internet are looking for ways 
to exploit the uncertainty users may feel about getting their names 
off spamming lists. Several readers forwarded a message they'd 
received touting a Web site that provides up-to-date information on 
the "go-go bars and adult nightlife" of Bangkok. Although the main 
content was nasty enough, the sleaziest part of the message was 
the removal instruction: "To be removed from our mailing list you 
must call 1-900-xxx-xxxx," the spam read. "There will be a one-time, 
75 cents charge on your phone bill to cover our administrative costs 
in removing your e-mail from our lists." Because very few folks who 
live where they can use a 900 number have an ongoing need for 
news on Bangkok nightlife, I suspect the whole point of the spam 
was to try to offend recipients into paying the removal fee.  

We can hope I'm not giving the more legitimate outfits any ideas by 
reporting these tactics, but you never know. It's easy to get the 
feeling that reporting spam abuse these days is a bit like having to 
report the crimes of small-time hoods to the big-time gangsters.  

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