Re: Spamming (Good or Bad?)

At 5:16 AM 8/21/96, Paul S. Penrod wrote:
>On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Ross Wright wrote:

>> Market Droids????  As a salesman I take offence at this slur.

Sales droids are subservient to market droids...sort of like R2D2, a sales
droid, getting his marching orders from C3PO, a market droid.


>As for spamming, I get enough of it via snail-mail, I don't want to see
>it in my Inbox too. And, for the record, there are lots of people out
>there who pay on the bulk charge, not by time. Sending advertising or
>junk mail to these folks costs them money, maybe not much for the one
>message you sent, but several thousand over a month of a quarter add up
>to real money.
>
>There is a time and place for legitimate advertising. I am sure that
>given time and impetus, a number of clear channel venues will open up to
>allow precision marketing and sales to happen electronicly.
>
>At the moment, it's bad nettiquette...

The basic problem is that, unlike paper mail, it costs a sender essentially
nothing to send nearly any size file to as many people as he wishes. This
is the basic economic fact of the Net at this time. Until this eventually
changes, spamming will be with us.

(I understand experts in the field of "spamming" have various names for
various flavors: spam, velveeta, jerky, etc. I'll call them all "unwanted
messages.")

The problem is one of economics and allocation of costs. Other industries
have the same issues:

* fax machines: costs of paper are borne by receiver, leading to high bills
when "junk faxes" are received (and hence some laws restricting such faxes)

* cellular phones: receiver of calls usually is charged air time. Thus,
"junk calls" cost money.

(My physical mailbox probably gets about $1 a day of junk mail, in terms of
postage paid. More, in terms of costs to print catalogs, fliers, freebies,
etc. It takes me about 20 seconds, tops, to decide what to discard
immediately and what to save, so at this point "their costs" > "my costs.")

In my view, attempting to legislate what is "junk" and what is not junk is
misguided. (And I suspect it rarely works in halting junk mail.) Junk is in
the eye of the beholder.

There are technological fixes which I would favor over attempts to ban
unwanted messages.

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:

> There are technological fixes which I would favor over attempts to ban
> unwanted messages.

In the meantime, before these technological fixes are easily implemented,
what is the proper way to handle unwanted commercial mail?

1) delete immediately

2) reply with 'Fuck off, morons!'

3) as in 2) plus an attachment of some 1Mb file

4) as in 3) plus a CC to the postmaster of the sending site

What if the spam says: 'Do only reply to this if you want
further contact with us' etc?

Does anybody have good advice, including risks for retaliation
from the vendors/postmasters for such 're-spam'?

Asgaard

> 
> On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
> 
> > There are technological fixes which I would favor over attempts to ban
> > unwanted messages.
> 
> In the meantime, before these technological fixes are easily implemented,
> what is the proper way to handle unwanted commercial mail?
> 
> 1) delete immediately
> 
> 2) reply with 'Fuck off, morons!'
> 
> 3) as in 2) plus an attachment of some 1Mb file
> 
> 4) as in 3) plus a CC to the postmaster of the sending site
> 
> What if the spam says: 'Do only reply to this if you want
> further contact with us' etc?
> 
> Does anybody have good advice, including risks for retaliation
> from the vendors/postmasters for such 're-spam'?

Informal law! The first content line could be "This is un-solicited mail". 
Then the MTA will remove it. Sender who doesnot put this line in his spam 
should be mailbombed. Though this kind of arrangement doesn't mean that spam
is nice thing if it has the line in it. 

- Vipul

> 
> On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
> 
> > There are technological fixes which I would favor over attempts to ban
> > unwanted messages.
> 
> In the meantime, before these technological fixes are easily implemented,
> what is the proper way to handle unwanted commercial mail?
> 
> 1) delete immediately
> 
> 2) reply with 'Fuck off, morons!'
> 
> 3) as in 2) plus an attachment of some 1Mb file
> 
> 4) as in 3) plus a CC to the postmaster of the sending site
> 
> What if the spam says: 'Do only reply to this if you want
> further contact with us' etc?
> 
> Does anybody have good advice, including risks for retaliation
> from the vendors/postmasters for such 're-spam'?

Subscribe them to cypherpunks, lots of times (if that is possible) and don't tell em hot to get off :)

Alternatively have a moderated "spam.die.die" mailing list and subscribe the culprit too this list.
Generate lot of data (like Octal dumps of entire hard disks) and keep sending out mails to these guys
on regular basis.

- Vipul

On Fri, 23 Aug 1996, Vipul Ved Prakash wrote:

>    ----- Message body suppressed -----
> 
> --CAA28180.840792057/tera.mcom.com--
> 
> 
What's with all these messages like this???  Who's doing this and WHY???


---

Zach Babayco

zachb@netcom.com  <----- finger for PGP public key
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/4127

Asgaard <asgaard@Cor.sos.sll.se> writes:
>In the meantime, before these technological fixes are easily implemented,
>what is the proper way to handle unwanted commercial mail?

>What if the spam says: 'Do only reply to this if you want
>further contact with us' etc?

Then you fix up the "Reply-to:" line to point back to them, helping them
debug their anti-loop procedures.  For extra credit use port 25 to create
the mail so that they can't easily ignore "Reply-to" and use the "From:"
line for their next salvo.

	Jim Gillogly
	Trewesday, 29 Wedmath S.R. 1996, 17:39

Asgaard wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
> 
> > There are technological fixes which I would favor over attempts to ban
> > unwanted messages.
> 
> In the meantime, before these technological fixes are easily implemented,
> what is the proper way to handle unwanted commercial mail?
> 
> 1) delete immediately
> 
> 2) reply with 'Fuck off, morons!'
> 
> 3) as in 2) plus an attachment of some 1Mb file
> 
> 4) as in 3) plus a CC to the postmaster of the sending site
> 
> What if the spam says: 'Do only reply to this if you want
> further contact with us' etc?
> 
> Does anybody have good advice, including risks for retaliation
> from the vendors/postmasters for such 're-spam'?


I always send a quick one liner - "Please send me more information". 
Often I'll ask a stupid question too ("Does your software work in
France?").  If more people did this, then they'd have to choose their
victims a bit more carefully in the future (assuming of course they're
trying to sell something).

Gary
--
pub  1024/C001D00D 1996/01/22  Gary Howland <gary@systemics.com>
Key fingerprint =  0C FB 60 61 4D 3B 24 7D  1C 89 1D BE 1F EE 09 06 
^S
^A^Aoft FAT filesytem is extremely robust, ^Mrarely suffering from^T^T

On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:

> At 5:16 AM 8/21/96, Paul S. Penrod wrote:
> >On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Ross Wright wrote:
> 
> >> Market Droids????  As a salesman I take offence at this slur.
> 
> Sales droids are subservient to market droids...sort of like R2D2, a sales
> droid, getting his marching orders from C3PO, a market droid.
> 
> 
> >As for spamming, I get enough of it via snail-mail, I don't want to see
> >it in my Inbox too. And, for the record, there are lots of people out
> >there who pay on the bulk charge, not by time. Sending advertising or
> >junk mail to these folks costs them money, maybe not much for the one
> >message you sent, but several thousand over a month of a quarter add up
> >to real money.
> >
> >There is a time and place for legitimate advertising. I am sure that
> >given time and impetus, a number of clear channel venues will open up to
> >allow precision marketing and sales to happen electronicly.
> >
> >At the moment, it's bad nettiquette...
> 
> The basic problem is that, unlike paper mail, it costs a sender essentially
> nothing to send nearly any size file to as many people as he wishes. This
> is the basic economic fact of the Net at this time. Until this eventually
> changes, spamming will be with us.
> 
> (I understand experts in the field of "spamming" have various names for
> various flavors: spam, velveeta, jerky, etc. I'll call them all "unwanted
> messages.")
> 
> The problem is one of economics and allocation of costs. Other industries
> have the same issues:
> 
> * fax machines: costs of paper are borne by receiver, leading to high bills
> when "junk faxes" are received (and hence some laws restricting such faxes)
> 
> * cellular phones: receiver of calls usually is charged air time. Thus,
> "junk calls" cost money.
> 
> (My physical mailbox probably gets about $1 a day of junk mail, in terms of
> postage paid. More, in terms of costs to print catalogs, fliers, freebies,
> etc. It takes me about 20 seconds, tops, to decide what to discard
> immediately and what to save, so at this point "their costs" > "my costs.")
> 
> In my view, attempting to legislate what is "junk" and what is not junk is
> misguided. (And I suspect it rarely works in halting junk mail.) Junk is in
> the eye of the beholder.
> 
> There are technological fixes which I would favor over attempts to ban
> unwanted messages.
> 
> --Tim May
> 

I agree about the technological fixes. When enough people figure out or 
are shown how to block unwanted messages, the economics of scale 
disappear real fast. Unfortunately, there will always be a ready supply 
of the unwitting, and government's reaction is to legislate rather than 
educate.

Practically, it would be better to allow and promote a technological 
outlet for all of this, as it will never go away, so long as the medium 
exists.

...Paul

"Paul S. Penrod" <furballs@netcom.com> writes:
>Practically, it would be better to allow and promote a technological 
>outlet for all of this, as it will never go away, so long as the medium 
>exists.

The technological outlet already exists: polite marketers use Web pages,
so that people who are interested in their offerings can find them using
one of the search engines.  Market droids (get over it, dude) are
unwilling to reach only people who are interested in their products.

	Jim Gillogly
	Trewesday, 29 Wedmath S.R. 1996, 20:45

On Wed, 21 Aug 1996, Jim Gillogly wrote:

> 
> "Paul S. Penrod" <furballs@netcom.com> writes:
> >Practically, it would be better to allow and promote a technological 
> >outlet for all of this, as it will never go away, so long as the medium 
> >exists.
> 
> The technological outlet already exists: polite marketers use Web pages,
> so that people who are interested in their offerings can find them using
> one of the search engines.  Market droids (get over it, dude) are
                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nothing to get over. That's Ross who has the problem with the term.

> unwilling to reach only people who are interested in their products.
> 
> 	Jim Gillogly
> 	Trewesday, 29 Wedmath S.R. 1996, 20:45
> 

Web pages are only the *basis* for the outlet. By themselves, yes, they 
do provide a forum for advertisers, but the page by itself is not very 
efficient in terms of targeted demographics. That's why people get a wild 
hair and take matters into their own hands and launch spam in the hopes 
of finding the customers they thought would come flocking to them in droves.

As the number of Web pages increase dramatically, the chances of getting 
a "first hit" diminish accordingly. Most people I know have neither the 
time or patience to wade through up to two hours of web surfing to find 
something that a few well placed phone calls and 10 minutes turns up said 
product or service.

The issue is convenience, not technology. The majority of US consumers 
couldn't give a rat's ass about the Internet or the Web. They want their 
product or service and they want it now. When the Web becomes more 
convenient to use than the telephone, then you will see nirvana for 
Cybershopping. Right now that isn't happening.

...Paul