Re: tlug: Question about spam

[Jonathan Byrne - 3Web <jq@example.com>]

I'm in the camp that holds spammers are the scum of the earth and should 
be placed under a lifetime ban of every owning a computer or working in a job
where they are ever required, or allowed, to use a computer for anything.

Why?

As has been cited, spam if fundamentally different than the paper junk mail
that shows up in my mail box, which I generally dispose of unread, with regret
only for the fact of what a waste of natural resources it is to produce such a
large volume of paper which will largely go unread by its recipients.  I wish
they would at least used 100% post-consumer recycled paper in that stuff.  But
the people who sent it have paid for it to be delivered, if not for the
disposal costs, so they have something like a right to do it, although some
people would argue that their mail box exists for their personal convenience
and no one who they have not authorized to do so has a right to send them
mail.  I don't sweat it that much.

Spam, on the other hand, is sent by people who have not paid to send it.
Rather, the recipient pays for it.  All along the way, the bandwidth and
diskspace consumed by the glut of spam flooding some parts of the Internet
raise the costs of large and small Internet providers.  What does this do?  It
raises their costs, which raises their members' costs, and generally reduced
their ability to concentrate on quality service at competitive prices, since
they have to waste time on spam fighting.  It also serves to generally reduce
the openness and cooperativeness that is a hallmark of the Internet.  There
were those who said the commercialization of the Internet was the end of the
world and would destroy the Net.  They were wrong, and its commercialization
has turned the Internet into a global economic and indeed, political force,
giving a voice to people who could otherwise have little opportunity to speak
out.  These are all Good Thangs (TM).  But in at least one area, the
doomsayers were right: spam is an evil which has arisen with the commercial
Net.  Spammers are essentially service thieves, many of them are also
attempting to perpetuate scams and frauds.

A recent spam that is going around arrived at many of the mail addresses at
3Web today, and many of our members were apparently also targeted.  This
English-language mail claiming to be from the Japan office of a Dutch company
called FemContact Software claims that the recipient downloaded their
shareware product on a 14-day trial which is now expiring and they must either
register the software or delete it within 7 days.  It also states that there
are both registration fees and cancellation fees, trying to make people
believe that either way, they must pay money to this company for something
they downloaded.  It's very legitimate-looking at first glance, too.  One of
the tip-offs of being fake, though, is that it nowhere gives an address or
phone number for the company it claims to be from, and even though the person
sending it (who signs a Japanese name to it) claims to be in the Japan office,
the mail address is a .nl domain.  If they are bombing Japanese Internet users
with this stuff, the many of whom don't read English very well if at all,
may understand it just enough to be caused anxiety by this sort of criminal
spam.  And again, the recipients are paying the cost of receiving this
garbage.

The original spam question likened it to someone's dog pooping in your
driveway.  You ask the owner to clean it up, you watch while they do, they go
on their way, and everybody forgets about it.  That is, however, a poor
analogy.

A better analogy is that the dog's owner deliberately takes it to your
driveway to poop, and then makes you supply a bag and clean up the poop
yourself and throw it away in your garbage can.  And of course, the dog is
wearing a fake dog license and the owner is carrying a fake ID, to try and
fool people into believing the dog, the owner, and the crap actually came from
somewhere else. 

Someone in this thread also asked at some point where spammers get people's
addresses.  One popular source is newsgroups, where they use software to comb
the newsgroups, harvesting people's e-mail addresses.  People who post to
newsgroups a lot also tend to get spammed a lot.  I get little spam because I
never post to newsgroups.  They also employ software that scans web pages
looking for e-mail addresses.  That's how we get some spam at our info and
support e-mail addresses, I'm sure, since they would only be known to someone
who is a 3Web member or who has visited our web site, unless a spammer just
took a blind shot at every web site they knew, assuming that many of them had
an address of info@example.com  However, our English support address is eigo@, not
something they could likely guess, so I'm sure they harvested that from our
web site.

On the question of how I see e-mail, yes, I treat it like my telephone.  Like
my telephone, it exists for my convenience and is not something I consider to
be at the disposal of strangers to use for making junk contacts. 

Regards,

Jonathan Byrne
Media and Content Section
3Web - Your Internet Solution! <URL:http://www.threeweb.ad.jp/index.en.html>
3Web Channel <URL: http://www.3web.co.jp/>

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