Legal Recourse Against Spammers You May Know? 101
xrepete asks: "I have been getting spammed by a legitimate company for the last five months. I have gone to their site to ask to be removed, and sent several e-mails to various address asking to be removed from their mailing list. I have been totally ignored. We all get spam from individuals we can't identify, but what recourse do we have if we actually _can_ identify them. I've heard that it is illegal for a company to not allow you to opt-out of marketing spam, but I can find any information about how to go about it." This was last touched on over three years ago, but recent events have shown that the new spam laws may have better teeth. Are there other things we can do to curb the e-mail abuses of the companies we do business with?
Easy Answer (Score:2)
Simple, Threaten them with the loss of your business.
Oh yeah, and you have to bitch about it on Slashdot to get a lot of people doing it.
Charge them! (Score:5, Insightful)
Charge them a series of escalating handling fees, starting at $5 and moving up to $5000 per message or whatever you feel like (don't be too unreasaonable). Give them one week before you start charging.
Send them written notice by both regular and registered mail. If they accept the registered mail, they cannot claim ignorance of your fees. If they deny the registered mail, then you have done your best to inform them of your rates.
When you send your bills, give them a time limit to pay them. If they do not pay you, take them to small claims court for the total amount they have not paid.
Good luck! (And of course, IANAL)
Certified Mail (Score:5, Informative)
I doubt most judges would ignore a registered receipt, but registered mail is for secure mailing (mailing the hope diamond and such), and is not legal proof of mailing.
Re:Certified Mail (Score:1)
Re:Certified Mail (Score:1)
I've got an idea... (Score:5, Funny)
After their site shuts down, they will get your point. And it's legal!
Re:anonymous being tracked and reported tsarkon (Score:1, Interesting)
When the scientologists sued (or threatened to sue) over some copyrighted material that got posted anonymously, the slashdot team not only deleted the comments, but also started removing the anonymity from AC posts. This wasn't CmdrTaco's decision -- it came from the VA legal departm
Call them (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, I think only the government can enforce the new law, so us private citizens are royally fucked over.
Someone above mentioned charging them on an increasing scale. Go ahead, but only after you have sent them a bill. If they don't accept certified mail, send it guaranteed delivery. They can't ignore that either, unless it is out of gross negligence (the mail room lost it...) or stupidity.
Can you stop doing business with them? Then do so, and wait exactly 18 months to the day. Then, bill them for taking up your time ($50 an hour), server space ($5 a Kilobyte), and bandwith ($10 a meg transfered) on an increasing scale.
My 2 cents...as above, IANAL...BIHBTC (but I have been to court).
Re:Call them tsarkon poops on triumph dog (Score:1)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/30/index.h
Legal Recourse? Why on earth...? (Score:5, Funny)
Go for it.
We won't tell.
Re:Legal Recourse? Why on earth...? (Score:3, Interesting)
I had the same problem a few years back and simply could not get them to remove me from their list. The recourse I took was probably not illegal but still satisfying and effective:
Eventually I created a 700K image with nothing but the word REMOVE in it. I sent
Re:c'mon (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, it is too hard. Particularly when spammers flasify subjects, senders, reply-to's, etc. Who are you to decide how hard it is?
>> Keeping in mind I am referring to an individual user, and not a company, which may otherwise spend lots of money on bandwidth, lost work, et cetera.
Oh, so its not okay for companies to deal with spam, but
Re:c'mon (Score:1)
Re:c'mon (Score:5, Interesting)
Presuming you spend 8 hours a day sleeping, you've got about 57,600 seconds per day to be awake. If you're exceptionally fast, you might be able to delete individual messages at a rate of one per second. But you're probably not fast enough to determine whether things are spam and delete them at that rate. Probably more like one every 3-5 seconds. So your capacity on a daily basis is perhaps somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 messages.
That, of course, presumes that you do nothing but scan messages and hit delete. All day. What percentage of mail you receive is spam? If you're relatively fortunate and it's only about 50%, and it takes you an exceptionally fast 55-57 seconds to read and possibly respond to each non-spam message, that means one spam plus one non-spam takes you about a minute. Now you're down to 1,920 messages a day, maximum.
Of course, you don't want to spend 16 hours a day in email. You'll probably spend several hours working, at least an hour total eating, some time in the bathroom, maybe time going places, maybe time just having a life. That all probably leaves you with only 1-4 hours of time to spend on e-mail, if you're a bad case (no one should have to spend that much time every day IMO).
So... 60-480 messages per day that you can probably handle. How much spam do you get? :)
Re:c'mon (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone goes on vacation for 6 months, and returns to find 35,000 emails in their inbox. 200 spams a day is normal for quite a few people. Said person gets carpal tunnel syndrome by having to check a box 35,000 times. Said person wastes 9.7 hours deleting spam. (one delete per second).
NOW, imagine if that person (individual user) deletes spam at the same rate per day. they waste three minutes a day deleting spam. 19.4 hours a year. Now, if there are, say 5 million people with a spam problem that bad (a conservatve estimate) that means 97 million hours are wasted a year because of spammers. 11,000 years of time gone, because of Spam.
What if that time were spent raising children (as individual users tend to do) or helping kids learn to read? What if that three minutes a day were spent on a few situps? Maybe the US wouldn't have the obesity problem it does today. What if everyone could sit down for three minutes more a day and relax?
Also, IF those 5 million people were dealing with spam at work, that is 1.5 trillion in lost wages ($15 an hour) in ONE YEAR. Hell, these spammers are costing us more then our national debt.
I say YES, it is too hard to hit that check box and hit delete.
End Spam Right Now! (Score:2, Funny)
Just go to the site: www.wewillownyourbox.com, and download the Spam plugin FREE!!!! (Sorry, Windows customers only)
Stop spam today!
To unsubscribe from this post go to www.wewillownyourbox.com and download the unsubscribe plugin. (Sorry, Windows customers only)
Spammers You May Know (Score:4, Interesting)
It is not particularly unusual to know who is sending the "spam", or who is paying for it to be sent. In either case the mail message headers will indicate where is the source of the message, and consequently it will provide enough information to determine who is the ISP for the host which sent the message. Either that ISP will have a process for dealing with "abuse", or their upstream ISP will, etc.
Larry
Re:Spammers You May Know (Score:2)
> indicate where is the source of the message...
Not true. Headers can be forged.
Re:Spammers You May Know (Score:2)
At some point on the path from source host to destination mailbox there will be a transition to a host on a legitmate ISP, and that host will correctly report the IP address from which it received the message; for the purpose of complaining, that IP address can be considered the source of the message.
Larry
Address (Score:4, Interesting)
Rus
Re:Address (Score:2)
Re:Address (Score:1, Flamebait)
Anywho, thanks for the heads up Yuri- I've never seen this place or anything like it. I will certainly start using it- and even if only "half the places" (*which* places?) don't accept it, that's still half the spam.
werd.
Re:Address (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Address (Score:2)
I've been doing this for over five years and my "real" address has (thank goodness) never got out (I only give it to humans). Over the course of five years, I've only accumulated about twenty or thirty procmail rules to discard mail to addresses that have been sold or leaked (most often via lax policy on someone else's website where large numbers of user addresses were posted). I also
Re:Address (Score:2, Informative)
No offense, but the spammers aren't that stupid. That's like people who write "bobNOSPAM@foo.com" thinking that will work. Most of the spam harvesting software knows about the "X+Y@" sendmail division and removes the "+Y" portion from the collection.
Re:Address (Score:2)
didn't read question did you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your answer has nothing to do with the question. He already knows who is sending this, likely he shoped at their store once, entered a contest where they notify by email, and then started getting their advertising flyers in his email. On all levels it checks out as them - they own the domain it is from, the spam, when opened (often it is some windows only format though) looks just like the one they send with the local newspaper. It is clear exactly who sent it. So you try the opt-out address, and it doesn't work.
So, how does your post help them at all? You can filter on the sender just as easially as who it is to.
procmail - their contact address (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Alternative Contacts (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a fax #. It says to mark the fax "ATTN: Recruitment", but if you send 100 faxes with "ATTN: Spamming Department", it will probably get to the right place, be it marketing or IT. Try to be nice and polite, but clearly indignant.
There's also a nice job application web form. If they got 1000 applications (you're a geek, cobble up a Perl LWP program), all with a message asking them to stop spamming you, again it will probably get escalated and do you some good. Include the full text of relevant federal and state anti-spam laws. Yes, use your real name - you want to really be taken off their list.
Also notice: a physical address. Haven't tried looking it up, but odds are you'll be able to find some phone number some where with it. Start polite and direct. If that doesn't work, try working through the exchange/pbx prefix to people at random. Validate that they work for that company and then repeat the message. For most the hits will be "it's not my department, you have to call so and so", but who cares; keep calling them anyway. You'll destroy productivity and be communicating the fact their business processes are for shite; eventually the right people will hear about, even if it's from fellow employees who now hate them for making their lives miserable.
Is it possible that they might get huffy and spam you more? Sure, but like you said, they are trying or seem to be legit so they can't afford to take it too far.
With the dot.bust and layoffs it is a real possibility that the one person whose job it was to edit the spam list was layed off and the remaining crew are too clueless to spend the time learning how to fix it - a little insult and injury is usually what's need to kick a lazy compnay in the butt. Been on the receiving side enough to know.
Re:Alternative Contacts tsarkon reports on FUCK (Score:1, Interesting)
(Use a disposable account from a disposable IP before moderating this up. Editors generally watch and see who moderates controversial things like this up.)
When you are logged in,
Re:Alternative Contacts tsarkon reports on FUCK (Score:1)
Re:Alternative Contacts (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Alternative Contacts (Score:2)
Re:Alternative Contacts (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see the point of simply being harrassing without wanting to achieve something specific. Harrassing for the pleasure of it makes you a sociopath, not a legitimately aggrieved consumer escalating ign
Re:Alternative Contacts (Score:2)
At worst, you'll just put a few extra megs onto the hard drive of the computer that's monitoring their fax line.
Re:Alternative Contacts (Score:2)
Source of my spam... (Score:3, Funny)
Procmail. (Score:2)
Do not leave a copy in your inbox.
How to deal with spammers in Washington State (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.smallclaim.info/ [smallclaim.info]
Cease and desist letter. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cease and desist letter. (Score:1, Insightful)
Obviously you don't read too much. Lean is what you do when you're standing at an angle. Lien is what you file against someone's property. Oh, and for your benefit, "loose" is what your pants are when they keep falling down; "lose" is when you have misplaced something.
This post brought to you by the Insensitive Grammar Nazis of Slashdot.
Oooh, you sent them several emails? (Score:1, Troll)
Blather (Score:1, Troll)
New Shimmer is a Slashdot article, AND a troll!
Similar problem (Score:5, Informative)
Now, I think the company you are dealing with is not an eTrust member. You may still be able to contact eTrust for help, though. I know at least half their complaints are for non-members so it may be worth it, I'm not sure.
Slashdot HAS covered this (Score:3, Informative)
Man from michigan sued sears and won under a junk fax law
Depends on what state you're in (Score:2)
email addresss hijacking? (Score:3, Interesting)
I HATE SPAM! It's not freedom of speach, its almost DOS'ing mail servers.
Sue they for "illegal use of private property" (Score:1)
I've threatened sue some real big company with that and it worked.
your AG's office (Score:1)
A bit of a contradiction there (Score:1)