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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Unbelievable Spam.
On Tue, 3 Feb 2004 [email protected] wrote: > Spammers are not stupid. I would suggest a statement of "All spammers are not stupid" instead of the above. Some spammers are quite dumb/naive, some are middle of the road, some are very smart and organized. Just like any other profession, there is always a mix. > They are smart criminal gangs which have not only managed to keep their > schemes running for several years in the face of great public animosity, > they have also managed to sabotage the efforts that supposedly work > against them. Frankly, I think thats a myth perpetrated by rabid anti-spammers. Its more like organized crime than any ragtag street gang. > When will we realize that SPAM is a social problem and it needs a social > solution? Buyer education is the big issue. People get scammed every day, whether its over the phone, over TV or email. Educating people to not fall into these traps is the hard part. > When will the major email providers sit down around a table and agree to > some guidelines for email exchange that make it impossible for rogue > users to inject large volumes of email into the system? I think that you'll find that there have been several attempts at coming up with a way to legitimize email marketing, and a lot of the attempts seem to be aimed at stomping out the chickenboners and junkmailers. I may not enjoy junkmail, but there are people who do sign up for mailing lists for commercial things. A long time ago when I was new to the internet I managed to sign up for some mailing lists because they were things I wanted. Now that address is spewed all over the place due to people selling my address, but thats happend with my phone numbers and my postal address as well. What does that mean -> I signed up for commercial email. Does it mean I want it from everyone? no. Its an important distinction which needs to be recognized, even by people who spend all day obsessing over spam (and posting it to NANOG-L). Supporting 'legitimate' marketing VS UCE I think is the key to reducing the deluge of crap in our mailboxes every day. Is it an easy task, absolutely not.
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