NOTE TO SPAMMERS: All of my addresses, including this one, should be considered poison to you. If you send me spam, or any other unsolicited e-mail, I *WILL* contact your sysops and complain. Consider yourselves warned.
Since September 1996, I have been intermittently receiving unsolicited e-mail from a variety of sources that promote products or services. These include, but are not limited to:
owlseye@owlsnest.com 9/15/96 Web site promotion owlseye@owlsnest.com 9/16/96 Web site promotion owlseye@owlsnest.com 10/8/96 Press release service pplus@party.com 1/31/97 Party Plus on-line chat service susan140@juno.com 3/2/97 4 in 1 Live Dateline jameson@netcom.ca 3/5/97 Foreign exchange service sales@globetech.demon.co.uk 3/6/97 Digital camera root@207.199.35.1 3/9/97 www.seductress.com bizmaster@usa.net 4/6/97 "Beat the IRS and pay no more" zebra-1@usa.net 4/21/97 "Good News": multiple ads howdee@howdee.com 5/14/97 Long-distance savings plan respond@oakcircle.com 5/15/97 Need a Home Loan? usa@quantcom.com 5/16/97 Increase Web page hits sascons@netvision.net.il 5/18/97 Web site monitoring service uvm@ipo.net 5/30/97 Unspecified business opportunity net100@usa.net 6/16/97 Toll-free 800# Internet access patrickwc@one.net 6/30/97 Research for upcoming book lolitax@worldcom.ch 7/8/97 Nude photos web site 24483970@usa.net 7/9/97 Credit card service bonus@answerme.com 7/27/97 Christmas products april@tersey.com 8/20/97 Access to adult web sites hiunsent21@juno.com 8/23/97 Company expansion dou@aol.com 9/4/97 Various software packages juaseji@oms.de 9/15/97 Bulk e-mail for profit xlr16dsxazq@04318.com 9/17/97 Entepreneurs' Super Mall xljr16dxzqu@07815.com 9/28/97 Response E-mail Marketing System teambuilder@mail-response.com 10/6/97 Travel guide for entrepreneurs 31755436@juno.com 10/21/97 How to be a great lover 34482280@cic.net 10/23/97 Arthritis, migraines, etc. announce@www.martianconsulate.com 10/25/97 Give a land claim on Mars bestcd@excalibur.vsub.com 10/28/97 Best e-mail list on the net 2281216@gte.net 10/29/97 $215B opportunity re utilities 89960430@24315.com 10/31/97 Internet casino and sportsbook cyber411@ecast.net 11/2/97 Cyber411 search engine money@cyber-pages.net 11/2/97 Make money: $5 orders daily yellowjacket@kuston.on.ca 11/4/97 Software re financial independence qa078@juno.com 11/10/97 Golf opportunity alphaomega@ultramail.com 11/10/97 Indian paintbrush The.Club@00187.com 11/10/97 www.clubsextasy.com bettrlife@1daystar.com 11/12/97 Make $1,000's per week co-op@online-success.com 11/15/97 Direct e-mail plan fgbvcsa@dds.comz 11/16/97 www.lightparty.com 4344s16p141@juno.com 11/16/97 Income opportunity
The key word here is unsolicited, and for that reason I exclude CareerBridge because I am using their site to post my resume.
Commercial advertising on the net is frowned upon when employed in an inappropriate context. There are some freenets and freenet-like ISPs, that rely on commercial advertising to help pay their overhead, and I can understand that. When a community-based ISP run by volunteers needs money for its overhead, any commercial source of funding is welcomed. For example, an advertiser would pay to sponsor a phone line at a freenet, thus adding to the freenet's available financial resources. In return, the freenet allows the advertiser to place a brief advertisement that will be associated with that phone line. I have absolutely no quarrel with that advertising approach. For much the same reason I have no quarrel with the idea of banner ads either, for free e-mail providers such as Yahoo, Netscape, Canada.com etc.
But when an individual user such as those listed above goes around posting unsolicited advertising, the recipient has to pay to receive the junk mail. Whether that payment be a flat monthly user fee in the case of a commercial ISP like AOL or Compuserve, or a periodic donation in the case of a freenet, the payment still originates with the user. And then there's an overhead payment on the part of the ISP, because they have to pay the company that connects them to the Internet. And such a payment is usually made more frequently than the user's donation to that freenet. (The ISP also has to pay for storage space to temporarily house that spam until the user can delete it from the ISP's server. Remember the recent Melissa worm and how it caused systems to crash because they couldn't handle the overload? Spam can do the same thing.) In fact, the ISP loses out doubly, since the advertiser never paid to advertise there. And then the ISP's Internet connector has to pay someone...and so on. What spammers are doing is akin to running an ad and then not paying the publisher. You've probably heard this phrase zillions of times, but I'm going to reiterate it anyway, repetition being the mother of skill, because it's just as true here as anywhere else: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. I would much rather have my ISPs avoid having to pay this kind of additional unnecessary overhead; every one of them is already working on a tight enough budget as it is.
If you feel the need to advertise your wares on the net, then create a Web page about it, put that page on a search engine and let us come to you. Or sponsor a freenet phone line--there are literally dozens of freenets around the world that would gladly welcome your advertising dollars to help ease their financial burdens.
There are people who don't like receiving such messages as unsolicited e-mail. I'm one of them. Surely there must be some way for you to promote your service or product without offending us.
Now, if you're one of those people who are as ticked off as I am, I encourage you to forward a copy of the spam you received to the closest place you can determine from its message headers to its place of origin. Usually abuse@<domain> will work; if not, try postmaster@<domain> or root@<domain< instead. Check the IP addresses too--they will sometimes not match the domains given. These spammers have a tendency to forge the headers.
Also, keep in mind that "urban legend" messages are a good source of addresses for spammers. Even though addresses in such messages don't always have a domain name attached, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to examine the main header to get an idea as to where they all come from. It takes only a few lines of QBasic or a word processor to create a workable mailing list out of these addresses. Then all the spammer has to do is upload the list, activate the mailbot, and whammo--instant spam. All we have to do is cut out all the excess addresses when forwarding messages like this, and in so doing, we can help to halt spamming in its tracks.