Selling your Inbox Instead of Chocolates? 55
Qxz86 asks: "I, am an 8th grader at a Tennessee middle school, and on the 21st of February, I was asked to provide names and e-mails and/or street addresses to a company called Schoolmall. The company then distributes them among companies like AT&T and Toshiba. Needless to say, they then spam you legally on account of these solicitations. For every nine that I turn in my school gets $2.25. How do you feel about this?" SchoolMall, a virtual "shopping mall", allows students to purchase items from several large retail chains, and a portion of that purchase (depending on the vendor) goes back to the school. This sounds innocent enough, but I am definitely bothered by the insinuation that they are asking children for email addresses with which someone can Spam unsuspecting targets. Does anyone else have more information on this program?
Spam law (Score:3, Funny)
Answer to Original Poster (Qxz86) (Score:5, Insightful)
You are getting closer and closer to what I envision as the perfect fund-raiser. In fact you only need to go one more step and you are there.
What is the problem with current fund raisers, I suggest? The cost to benefit ratio. Those church catalogs that are full of popcorn, stained glass ornaments, chocolate covered nuts, even World's Finest Chocolate Covered Almonds (which I LOVE, btw)
I always wish when the fundys come to my cube there was simply a 'Donate $3 to the cause' box, maybe I could get a nice laser printed black and white certificate of 'Good Person' or something instead of buying a 10 pound box of popcorn or a $38 glass trinket with a candle in it. If 100% of that $3 went to the cause it would be a LOT easier than convincing me to spend $30 - $60 on stuff I don't want or need.
Maybe if you explained to the adults that you had some company that will give you 25 cents for each email address and the company gets to spam them, or the adult can give you whatever change he has in his pocket and you will gleefully go away and apply whatever he donates to your cause
Summer is coming. Want to make a TRUCKLOAD of cash for your cause? Tell the manager at WalMart you want to hold a fund raiser car wash in their parking lot. A lot of them will donate all the supplies and space in their parking lot, and some will actually match whatever you guys earn in the course of the car wash. Don't price it, accept 'donations' and be sure people know what the fund raiser is for (be specific.) You would have to sell a bunch of email addresses to match the $5 I will give you to wash my car.
No joke.
Another cash raiser (Score:3, Insightful)
Go to WalMart. Buy or shoplift a half dozen of those door peep hole things ( http://www.safetycentral.com/doorviewpeek.html ) for like $2 apiece, get a measuring tape or some string so you can find the center of some random doors, get some adult to go with you door to door and offer to install them in the door, say that if they had one they woul
Re:Another cash raiser (Score:2)
Re:Answer to Original Poster (Qxz86) (Score:1)
If people are doing fund-raisers to provide products, then find reasonably-priced ones. Otherwise, just let me give your school $5 or $10 and be
I feel that it sucks (Score:3, Interesting)
"legal"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the company is asking for people to voluntarily submit their own email address then it's a different story.
Of course as the owner of a few domains I can create email addresses at will and could scam the hell out of this on behalf of my local school.
Note, the privacy policy mentions special rules for children under 13 which is about the age of the typical 8th grader. Coincidence?
Re:"legal"?? (Score:2)
maybe that's the key. if a ton of domain holders all did this, we can effectively make this program too expensive and can shut it down. yet another form of slashdotting!
Re:"legal"?? (Score:2)
What you'll do is drive down the price of a single e-mail address, so kids will try to get more addresses. Also, since they (as per the original poster) ask for street addresses, it's easier for them to determine if it's a real person or not (hint: 500 people don't live in my basement).
Re:"legal"?? (Score:2)
There was a case here in MA where Fleet sent one of those "instant $10,000 loans" to a 14 year-old. He signed it and put it in his bank account. Since the kid was 18yo, Fleet couldn't get it's money back and the kid got a $10k grant from fleet. Sorry for being short on details, but it's early. It had something to do with age requirements for binding contracts.
PLEASE! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:PLEASE! (Score:2)
when i was a kid we had to sell chocolate and the likes of other stuff, not email. my message to kids is pull out the pen and be creative. if they give money for email addys turned in non-verified, as in they dont know if they wont bounce or not this is a potential cash cow. if they do judge by wether or not it will bounce turn in your school's email addy's and every other local email addy. along with whomever elses you can find. including the white house ;)
this
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
I figure I could make a jillion email addresses on one of the domains I'm squatt^H^H^H^H^H^H reserving, give 'em all to this company, make some quick cash, and then null-route the emails a few days later.
Re:Wow! (Score:2, Funny)
There's the way to solve school funding woes!
Re:Wow! (Score:1)
Re:Wow! (Score:1)
Who said that the pillars were mutually exclusive?
Naked women: GOOD!
Women in lingerie: GOOD!
Re:Wow! (Score:1)
Re:Wow! (Score:1)
That's 36 addresses (since you get 2.25 for 9) per month and you're covered. I can just see the child labor now where the class of the student who turns in the script to execute above plot first wins a fabulous pizza party.
Re:Wow! (Score:1)
Right up until the VC for this stupid scheme runs out...
What next? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously...what more can we do to pollute young minds? Don't some schools still make kids watch that propoganda TV?
-psy
Re:What next? (Score:2)
In fact, one of my teachers would ask us questions such as "What interest would company A have in sponsoring this program?"
Re:What next? (Score:2)
-psy
Re:What next? (Score:1)
Re:What next? (Score:1)
We once had the govenor speak at a school I attended. I wonder now if the school got kick backs as it seemed to be a re-election speech as opposed to a "preparing young minds for the future" speech.
Re:What next? (Score:2)
-psy
P.S: If you're dating an Irish guy, shouldn't you be drunk right now?
Re:What next? (Score:1)
Call ObligSimpQuote() (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Call ObligSimpQuote() (Score:2)
-psy
Re:Call ObligSimpQuote() (Score:1)
Re:What next? (Score:1)
1. Senior citizens vote down any new school spending proposals and parents of school children do nothing.
2. Public education is handled on the local level, instead of the county level, creating a $$$$hitload of expensive redundancy that wouldn't be there if people would just get over their fear/bigotry towards people of different socioeconomic groups. This keeps property taxes super high, resulting in item #1.
propaganda TV: Chanel one? (Score:1)
UCE is still UCE (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone who knows my email address gives it to a company without my knowledge or consent, it is still unsolicited business email.
This is called a referral in the business world. It is probably an attempt to get around spam legislation in certian states, since a referral is the beginning of a business relationship.
The problem now is that *any* business could claim that my address was 'referred' to them, and then say that to protection the privacy of their clients they won't tell me who or when I was referred.
Since we live in an 'innocent until proven guilty' country the burden would be on me to prove that no one referred me.
So existing spam legislation should be changed assumiong that referrals are valid business relationships:
If a third party provides a referral to a business to be contacted via email, with whom the business does not have a prior relationship, the business is allowed to send not more than 1 email to the target, and that email must contain the verified name and email address, and claimed relationship of the person that referred the target. In addition, no person shall refer more than 10 people in one day. The business must obtain and verify the referrer's full name, address and phone number, and keep these on file, providing them to law enforcement officers on warrant or subpeona. The target may also request this information, which must be provided within 3 business days without warrant.
If the referrer indeed has a pre-existing relationship with the target, then he can have no reason to keep his identity, address and phone numbers secret. Furthermore, personal referrals generally don't result in millions of email addresses at a time. 10 a day is a safe limit.
Sure, there are loopholes, but I believe that in a capitalist society referrals are a valid source of business, and while I'd rather hear about the business from a friend, who gets the reward when I tell the company who referred me, I can see valid situations where the friend has the business contact me. Just not many of them.
There isn't much of a difference between a friend selling my email address, and referring me with a bonus if I buy something. Since email addresses aren't considered property then we'd have a hard time pushing that as the case.
-Adam
Run (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't like this one little bit. People I know turning in my address for $$$? That's sneaky and underhanded. I think spam has gone far enough. I do beleive it is the #1 threat on the internet right now. Marketing people need to find another way to solicit me.
-or-
Re:Run (Score:2)
I don't, but given that I only get 3-4 useful messages, and 15-20 spam mails, it's akin to the email spam percentage for most people (I get very minimal amounts of spam now)
ok (Score:1)
Figures (Score:1, Offtopic)
I noticed from your spelling.
And I mean that in a good way.
Qxz86, my advice to you kid: (Score:4, Informative)
It may be that SchoolMall is smarter than they sound and they will disallow just email addresses, especially if they come from hotmail or yahoo where they can be created easily. In that case, I will donate to you as many fake email addresses as you desire. And if I'm lucky, maybe you'll give me a receipt when SchoolMall makes the donation, so I can deduct it on my taxes, right? ^_^
Evil! (Score:2)
Regardless of the intention they have, what they are doing is not a good thing.
How to make non-profit PROFIT (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Hire geek to write bot to submit addresses 20 at a time to schoolmall
3. Non-profit PROFIT!
Make a mint (Score:1)
step 2, foreach address ('a' to 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzz') createMbox(address@mydomain.com)
step 3, make lots and lots and lots of money turning in the addresses you just made.
Asked By _Who_? (Score:5, Insightful)
> provide names and e-mails and/or street addresses > to a company called Schoolmall.
Asked by _who_? Your teacher? If so, tell your parents and tell them to raise holy hell with the school board. If you were approached directly by Schoolmall I suggest that you have your parents contact your state attorney general about taking legal action against them.
What about the Child Protection Act? (Score:2, Insightful)
Use these (Score:2)
Submit.
That should be good for $2.5Million.
Take your school on a field trip to Jamaica.
Hmmm, what I want to know is..... (Score:2)
Hmmm, what I want to know is who asked you to do this?
The PTA?
A teacher or administrator at your school?
Some of your classmates?
This sounds sneaky and underhanded; and DOUBLY so if they approached your cash-strapped administrator with a make money fast scheme along the lines of collecting soup can labels.
And if this works... (Score:2)
Back to email, this past weekend's Cringely [pbs.org] is about an email system where the recipient sets a price that the sender must pay in order for the message to get through. You can set Grannie's price to $0.00 and funwithfarmanimals.com or whoever to $5.00 or $10.00 or however high you want to either turn a profit or turn them away. Unfortunately he suggests letting PayPal
Bad idea... (Score:2)
I understand that they probably require you to fill out a form with name, mailing address, phone, etc...but if it's a good cause, I'd figure most ppl would be more willing to donate $3 to the school than to give out a good E-Mail address...
Of course, there are a lot of con artists that falsely claim to be from a school...this is why the door-to-door fund raisin
Buy a domain and make $2.25 million for your schoo (Score:1)
For every nine that I turn in my school gets $2.25
a1@yourdomain.com
a2@yourdomain.com
a3@yourdomain.com
...
Profit!
This is so wrong (Score:2)
If George II wasn't dumping $100 billio