By: Mick Brown
Today is the first anniversary of AGIS.net removing megaspammer Sanford Wallace's
Cyberpromotions spamhaus. AGIS disconnected cyberpromo.com on 16 October 1997. All
the dedicated spammers that were on AGIS.net circuits were removed by the spring
of 1998, and I don't remember seeing any AGIS related spam in a LONG time.
Are we any better off? I'm not sure. The spammers scattered, and the DMA has
lobbied hard to legalize spam. So far as I can tell they and similar Direct Marketing
Organizations are responsible for much of the spam language in the recent USA Senate
1618 and House of Representatives 3888 bills (see http://www.spamfree.org
and http://www.cauce.org for more information).
The Direct Marketers Association http://www.the-dma.org
represents companies who rent lists of names, addresses, and phone numbers. They
usually don't represent the manufacturers or resellers, and certainly not Joe Average.
They represent the folks who call you at dinnertime and the folks who are responsible
for the increasing numbers of hang up calls in early evening. Although their members
are responsible for invading the sanctity of your home, they claim that their membership
list is a "trade secret" or "proprietary information" so you
cannot find out who they really represent. They are currently advertising a conference
on how to direct pharmaceutical ads at you http://www.the-dma.org/news4/pharm/pharm.html
. I really don't see how they can do that without looking at your medical and drugstore
records.
The DMA http://www.the-dma.org/busasst6/busasst-onmarkprivpr6a7.shtml#C
is saying that harvesting your email addresses from public and private fora for
use in unsolicited messages is fine if the marketer sends email informing you of
his intentions to use your addresses and an opportunity to opt out.
The DMA advises their members that they may ignore the requests of consumers
to remove names, addresses, and phone numbers if the consumer pays a third party
to contact all the hundreds of direct marketers in his behalf.
It appears to me that the DMA and similar organizations are not acting in the
interest of their customers (businesses who sell products) nor the consumer but
in the interest of the telemarketers and mailers who get paid on a per-name used
basis. The DMA is making consumers jump through unnecessary hoops to get on do not
call or do not mail lists. They lobby against laws that would allow you to fill
out a form at your post office to stop getting junk mail, they lobby against laws
that would allow you to check boxes on your phone bill to get off the annoying telephone
solicitors lists.
The people who run those lists mine information about you from every source they
can. One of those companies is called IBM Midrange Professionals (from whois "midrangepros.com")
which collects information about home addresses, phone numbers, job titles and lots
of other information from company websites, the Internic whois database, and classifieds
sites. WWW.midrangepros.com sent out a spammed mailing on 4 Jun 1998 for www.developer.ibm.com
advertising IBM tools and strategies for Mr. Bill's OS.
I was shocked to see a post entitled "All is lost spammed by IBM Corporate"
.... and investigation showed that it was true. Further investigation pulled up
a post claiming to quote a communication from one of IBM's official spokesmen Tim
Blair tblair@us.ibm.com in http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=341405599
| . . . First, I should explain IBM's interpretation
| of 'spamming'. The term clearly has a negative connotation, and by our
| interpretation, involves senders who knowingly conceal their identities, or
| continually send you emails after you have requested that they stop doing so.
| The flip side of this is that there are legitimate reasons for distributing
| mass emails (in the same way mass mailings are distributed to our physical mail
| boxes.)
| IBM and other ISPs are working on developing tools that enable customers to
| "filter-out" unwanted email.
I don't see how Tim's IBM approved spam differs from spam as we know it... except
IBM claims to be working on spam filter software to sell us... to protect us from
IBM approved & other spam.
None of my queries to Mr. Blair, various IBM VP's or Product Managers, to IBM's
CEO, Mr. Gerstner, or official contacts at IBM have disputed that Mr. Blair's comments
represent official IBM policy. In fact IBM has almost uniformly ignored my queries
other than indicating that they passed the buck to higher ups. IBM has since removed
the page to Write Lou from the home page.
I also queried these folks in reference to a spam sent by IBM via FDDS. See the
Thread starting at http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=359817707
which contains a copy of the IBM Corporate spam. IBM spanked partner www.iwsc.com
hard when they spammed, IBM has been almost silent when they did almost the same
thing.
IBM still has not responded whether it stands behind Mr. Blair's policy statement
on behalf of IBM. Mr. Blair has not denied that he wrote it. IBM Midrange Pros is
still gathering data on your employees and your business and targeting them for
telephone, mail, and (probably) email solicitations. (To be fair one official IBM
contact denied that midrangepros.com is an IBM business unit.)
-- Mick Brown
Things individuals can do:
Register your email preferences at http://www.safeeps.com
to show what unsolicited commercial email you are willing to receive. (If you don't
want any kind of spam don't check any of the boxes.)
SafeEPS is run by a wealthy acquaintance who manages the Mail and Telephone Preference
systems for the DMA. Rodney is also highly anti-spam. He was instrumental in removing
lots of spammers when he ran one of the smaller backbone networks. Adding your name
to the 40 million already in the safeEPS system he runs is another vote against
spam held and confirmed by a party trusted by most marketers and many of the anti-spam
community.
Find out how to report spam. At a minimum report the spamvertised website and
the email addresses in the body of the message. If unsure don't report the from
address which is almost always forged. If more people do this, the reluctant networks
will start removing websites of spamvertisers. tracerte is in your /tcpip/bin directory
whois is on hobbes. http://www.ao.net/waytosuccess/nospam.html
has spam fighting tips and information, and I'll upload some links to OS/2 software
useful in spam fighting to my http://forums.delphi.com/m/main.asp?sigdir=pro_internet
web board tonight or tomorrow.
If you have stock in a company that provides services to spammers (e.g. Bellsouth,
AT&T, Cable & Wireless (cw.net cwi.net cwix.net), Worldcom (ans.net, compuserve.net,
uu.net, alternet.net), Sprint all have persistent spammers in their networks, there
are others too) write to the board concerning why they are permitting their downstream
customers to continue to spam. Request that they amend their acceptable use policies
to fine spammers and shut them off whether they spam directly or indirectly in email,
usenet, web boards, or IRC.
AT&T has amended their AUP & reporting requirements so that if you don't
give your name address phone company etc. they state they won't investigate or terminate
even if other evidence shows their customers are abusive www.cerf.net http://www.cerf.net/cerfnet/aup/enf-procdrs.html
and http://www.cerf.net/cerfnet/aup/abuse-report.html
. AT&T has been accused of and settled suits for violating telephone privacy
laws see http://consumer.net . AT&T won't
stop calling my neighbor nor my roommate although it is illegal for marketers to
ignore do not call requests, and they want your personal information before they'll
investigate their abusive customers.
See http://consumer.net and similar organizations
to see how US businesses are violating your rights to be left alone.
Spam and other intrusive unsolicited marketing is not just a waste of resources
of my ISP, my email quota, etc. it is usually a violation of my privacy.
Why can't I send a form to my post office to stop junk mail or indicate the types
of junk mail I'd like? Why can't I check boxes on a form and indicate what telephone
solicitations I'm willing to accept? Why do the folks who really are investigating
me (DMA ATA AMMA etc. members) (a` la the "Are they Investigating You?"
TCPS spammer) get to determine what ads I see?
Editors note: Mick Brown is the moderator of the USENET Newsgroup comp.os.os2.announce.
Though the above is not directly related to OS/2, we in the OS/2 community have
become more dependent on the internet then the average windoze user for our daily
OS/2 news and software. For that reason we need to support efforts that help the
internet community in general. Please direct any comments to editor@os2voice.org