Email Spam in Compliance with the Law

[dvduval]

What's the deal with this sort of message?

This email is sent in compliance with the new e-mail bill section 301. Under Bill S. 1618 TITLE III passed by the 105th US Congress.
This message can not be considered as Spam because we include the way to be Removed, Paragraph (a)(c) of S. 1618.

TO REMOVE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS FROM OUR MAILING LIST: you can send message to some-spammer.net with Subject "Remove".

I replied with "Remove" in the subject line, but the message was returned. It doesn't seem like it worked.

[oilman]

If I recall correctly the bill never became a law so the whole argument is moot. The original bill was all about telephone slamming and then some senator added the amendment about spamming. It takes both the house and the senate to make a law. Both factions were working up their own slamming bills and the never got together and none of it actually became law. It's all just more spam.

Disclaimer:
I'm Canadian so I may be way off in my assessment of how a bill becomes law - I just read it somewhere once ;)

[richlowe]

This never became law. In fact, it's a great way to determine if something is spam - if it includes this message, it's spam.

The proposed law was silly and it's a good thing it didn't pass.

the remove links almost never, ever work.

Richard Lowe

[hutcheson]

>the remove links almost never, ever work.

Nay, not so, but far otherwise.

The "remove" links provide confirmation that the e-mail address is indeed valid.

OK, so how DOES it work?

Metaspammer "E-mails-R-us.com" RENTS (not sells) his mailing list to spammers "X-pensive-products.com" for ONE USE ONLY. XPPC sends out his spam, carefully collecting the "remove" requests, carefully removing them from his copy of the mailing list (which he doesn't even have the right to ever use again), and selling them back to EMRUC (who has no obligation to remove them from HIS list, since he's never actually sent anything to them). EMRUC adds them to his "guaranteed-valid-list-of-email-addresses", which he rents to all and sundry (for a higher price, naturally).

Six months later, a company called Cheap-products.com leases "another" mailing list from EMRUC, for ONE USE ONLY. All the email addresses removed from the XPPC list are, strangely enough, still in the new list -- together with a number of addresses who had in the meantime requested to be removed from XPPC's mailing list.

All perfectly legal, and what's $7.95 for another domain name, when it's protecting you from both lawyers' harassment AND the public obloquy?

[edited by: Woz at 6:51 am (utc) on Nov. 21, 2002]
[edit reason] TOS#14 [/edit]

[richlowe]

Sigh. I meant, of course, exactly what you said - they do not remove you at all. Who knows what they do, but they do not remove you.

Richard Lowe

[pkchukiss]

Hmmm... Looks like these spammers are very creative. I receive messages which include that bill inside. I hate spammers. They should be banned from ever touching any electronic equipment

[bobriggs]

As far as replying with remove or clicking remove, etc:

[spam.abuse.net...]

You'll see rule number one: Spammers Lie.

Rule #2, and this is the last rule for me: Read Rule #1.

[Learning Curve]

That bogus legalese means it's 100% spam. You can take an excerpt from it to use in your spam filter.

[bobriggs]

exactly. You can probably call your filter 'section 301' and have it look in the body text for 'section 301', which would be sufficient.

On my mailwasher, I just look for the word 'spam', and mark it as probable spam, mark to be deleted, because who would use the word, other than a spammer to say that 'this is not SPAM'.