Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Spammers You Know?

courteaudotbiz writes "For years, a business named Compu-Finder has been sending spam all around the province of Quebec, Canada. In their emails, there is a phone number where we can reach them, and an unsubscribe link that you can click and seems to work, but even after asking them on the phone, by email or with their unsubscribe link, to unsubscribe me, I still receive 10 — 15 spams a week coming from this company. Many bloggers, journalists and radio chroniclers talked about them, but they seem to be untouchable. Still, it is easy to find the names, addresses and phone numbers of the shareholders and administrators of the company. How can we, collectively, take action to make them understand that we do not like their mass mailing practice?"

Re:First Hand Experience...

[fifedrum]

and I work on the other end, supporting a few million email accounts. I like ESPs like you, because you work diligently to keep your senders on the up and up, but this scumbag will just move on to some other ESP, or worse, start connecting with hosted email providers like us, and spam from there.

There is no way to defend against it EXCEPT to put their phone numbers and domains in black lists from the start. That, and as per a suggestion above, kill it with fire.

Fight spam with real mail

[cronos1013]

There is a simple and SUPER fun way to combat this. Get the google toolbar with auto fill for forms, and sign up for every free thing on the market you can with their address. This was done to a spammer a couple years back in the US and I guess once your postal mail volume reaches a certain ammount they stop delivering it, and bill you if you dont pick it up. If 10000 people sign them up for 1000 deliveries of junk real mail, they might get the picture. Maybe....

Re:This is Canada

[tlhIngan]

Ah, but it's Quebec.

Make sure they follow the language laws, if not, report them to the language police. They're apparently quite vicious.

Also, Quebec has very special status in Canada since they basically want to do everything themselves and only give token attention to Ottawa (they have their own sales tax - QST, that the Harper Government (tm) is paying $4B or so for them to change it to an "H" to implement the HST which would do the same thing). Quebec can easily make it very hard for a business that's not obeying its laws to do business inside Quebec, even if they're not in Quebec.

It's why in Canada there's lots of things that are "excluding Quebec" - not just sweepstakes/lottos/etc, but also products that basically are unavailable to be shipped to Quebec. They have the requisite French, but they don't meet some other part of Quebec law and are therefore disallowed.

Re:Block it and move on

[MobyDisk]

Ironically, getting nothing is exactly what he wants. It's funny how much time we spend trying to get people to stop wasting our time.

Re:Block it and move on

[Nanoda]

After all the spam I've gotten in the past ~15 years? If I found out there was a spammer in my own city, I'd be willing to spend at least a couple of evenings trying to shut them down.

Re:Getting your point across

[Onymous Coward]

Rather, his request is a thinly-veiled plea for vigilante/mass action from the Slashdot community. That kind of making them understand.

Like calling 1.800.861.6618 [theutraining.com] or emailing them at [e-mail] [mailto] (ooh, that's the first time I've made a mailto link in a /. discussion — wonder if it'll work) or at [e-mail] [mailto], or just visiting their website a bunch.

Which could actually happen, I wouldn't be surprised. I stand by, curiously awaiting report of the results.