spammers are not all equal

[gusl]

In the last year, I've been put on mailing lists of two musicians:

* Sarina Suno
* Becky Durango

The former swore that she had met me at a party in Tribeca. I had to ask 4 times to be removed.

The latter had no excuses, just a link to my info, so I can update/unsubscribe yourself. Somehow, her system knew that I lived in Pennsylvania (how??). But after deleting myself from her system, I feel confident that I won't hear from her again.

They both entered my email from the PNG image I have on my homepage (I don't think they're using OCR). I know this because I never send email from that address.

If this were your regular Viagra enlargement / get-rich-today / debt-free / lose weight / fake rolex / diploma mill / online casino / silverfernz spam, I wouldn't even think of clicking on such a link. (Also it would have been put on my spam folder)

What about people who added you to their mailing list by mistake, but are too careless to take you off? Are they spammers? What about those who added you legitimately, but still neglect your request to unsubscribe?

Doesn't anyone maintain a wall of shame? Like a BBB for the web. Surely, big retailers like Silverfernz need to be named.

Comments

[selfishgene.livejournal.com]

I think it is so commonplace that a wall of shame would require nearly as many server farms as Google has.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

It should only include violators who are big enough. If Amazon.com were spamming assholes wouldn't you like to know?

How about only the violators among the 1 million biggest sites? That's at most a few MB.

I think that sites like Trombi, Silverfernz qualify as big enough.

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

I think what would really be useful is a reputation system by which you could report annoying email and collect all such reports to calculate who not to accept email from.

Of course you can quickly show that this would require a full-on reputation network to cover the reporters themselves, since if you accepted arbitrary reports the system could easily be gamed.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

isn't it remarkable that Wikipedia works at all?

Can't a similar mechanism prevent gaming? (I suspect not, because unpaid volunteers are usually not willing to do uncreative work)

[(Anonymous)]

I think what happens is these musicians hire promoters to put up concert flyers, set up their MySpace page, and maintain their mailing lists. There was a local one... can't find their website... maybe they're out of business... can't be much money in it. They were trying to hire someone for like $8/hour last summer.

I work for a marketing firm now. Name of the game is, whittle down your lists to the most receptive audience. Throw out the bounces and opt-outs. Don't piss off too many people or you'll get on the spam blacklists. There are incentives to be "good spammers" but it works too well to stop doing it... we'd just go out of business and the other marketers would keep doing it.

Unsubscribe, delete, forget about it...

Two things that would help
- A standard unsubscribe protocol
- A free, central opt-out database... maybe ad-supported...

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Who is this?