🚀 go-pugleaf

J K Rigney (jkri...@msn.com) wrote:
: Proudy wrote:
: > These online postings come from the original mailouts that have been
: > done for years. Of course they don't work, and yes it is just another
: > pyramid scheme. 

: I routinely report chain letters to the offenders' ISP's. Often as not,
: I get a reply that service has been terminated or suspended. I got a
: reply from a Canadian ISP indicating that they not only suspended the
: offender but reported ALL of the names and addresses in the chain letter
: to the RCMP. Looks like the service providers are really getting sick of
: it.

: I encourage everyone not to flame the spammer--that just clogs up the
: newsgroup(s) to which the garbage is posted--but to report the abuse to
: the postmaster at the place of origin (check the header for NNTP Posting
: Host). It does get results.

Indeed they are.  I usually save the messgae with _all_ the headers,
and import it back into a reply, carboned to 'postmaster' and
optionally 'abuse' at every address in those headers which seems
pertinent... tagged with this, an assemblage of things I've gleaned
from several posters in the past three months or so:
-----------------------8<----------------------8<------------------------
United States Code, Title 47, Chapter 5, Subchapter II, says that "it
shall be unlawful for any person within the United States to use any
telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an
unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine." A
telephone facsimile machine is defined in Section 227(a)(2)(B) as
"equipment which has the capacity to transcribe text or images (or
both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line
onto paper."

By US Code Title 47, Sec.227(a)(2)(B), a computer/modem/printer meets
the definition of a telephone fax machine.  By Sec.227(b)(1)(C), it is
unlawful to send any unsolicited advertisement to such equipment,
punishable by action to recover actual monetary loss, or $500,
whichever is greater, for each violation.

Please stop this.  You have been put on notice.  I have recorded your
site name; further UNSOLICITED and UNWANTED junk mail from your site
will force me to follow up under federal law.

Postmasters: your systems were used to send this message.  If this is
contrary to your AUP's, please act accordingly.  If it is not, you may
wish to take advice on whether not adding such a provision leaves you
open to legal exposure.
-----------------------8<----------------------8<------------------------
Occasionally, I ad this well written piece, too:
-----------------------8<----------------------8<------------------------
Spamming

Spamming is defined as posting identical or nearly-identical messages
(not just ads, although ads are usually what spammers post) to a lot of
newsgroups, one right after the other.  Since it's really not that
difficult to write a program that will post the same advertisement to
dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of newsgroups, a lot of people have
taken to doing this.

What's happened to people who've spammed?

They've lost their accounts, been mail-bombed (had thousands of pieces of
junk email sent to them), had people call up and yell at them in the
middle of the night, had people forward their mail (by this I mean paper
mail, not email) to someplace strange, had people sign them up for
thousands of unwanted magazine subscriptions, had people send them
thousands of pages of condemnatory faxes, and so forth.

*Nothing* is as hated on Usenet as spamming. It's extremely, unbelievably
rude and if you do it, you *will* come to regret it.

This is not a threat -- it's an observation.  Any benefits spamming might
have brought you will be more than counteracted by the intense public
outcry against you in every newsgroup you posted your ad to.

Some members of the media have gotten the mistaken impression that
spamming is hated because it's *advertising*.  While it's true that
Usenet
users don't have much fondness for advertising, the real reason spamming
is hated so much is because it's unbelievably *rude*.

If you don't regularly read a newsgroup, why would you post an ad to it?
In so doing, you're basically saying that you don't care what the people
in that newsgroup think or whether your ad might inconvenience them;
you're out to benefit yourself.  When you spam by posting the same
advertisement to hundreds or thousands of newsgroups, you're saying that
your personal profit is more important than the discussions of millions
of people.

Would *you* like it if someone came by your house day after day and
shoveled several thousand copies of an advertising circular through your
windows?

Each copy of the ad takes up disk space on thousands of machines around
the world -- and if you post the ad 1,000 times, that's millions of
copies of your message that *you* are making other people pay to store
copies of.  When you spam, you're hogging hundreds of thousands of
dollars worth of other people's storage space.

So please, don't do it. I've already explained that *one* copy of an
off-topic ad is rude because it has nothing to do with the group it was
posted to. Multiply that by a thousand times to get an idea of how rude
it is to spam.

A quick note about what happens to spam:
----------------------------------------

Another consideration against spamming is that Usenet readers developed
defenses against it, so it's not very effective. There are quite a few
spam detectors running on Usenet, and if one of them detects that the
same message has been posted repeatedly to multiple newsgroups, the
humans who run those spam detectors will step in and actually *erase* the
spamming messages with 'cancel' messages which are honored at most sites
around the world.

A common misconception shared by many members of the media is that spam
is bad because it's *advertising* and that people who cancel spam are
doing so to get rid of *advertising*. In actual point of fact, most
Usenet users consider cancellation to be extremely bad manners and
something to be done only as a last resort. When spam-cancellers cancel
spam, it's done because of the *volume* (posting hundreds of times), not
because of the content.

The analogy that's often used is that yes, you have the right to walk
down the street and say whatever you like -- but you do NOT have the
right to stick your head in someone's house at 3 am and shout through a
bullhorn.

So if you *do* spam, you're likely to lose your account, have your
personal life made a living hell, possibly get sued by people whose
storage space you're taking up, and in the end, not very many people are
even going to see your advertisement.  It's just not worth the grief
you'll get.

Sorry to be unpleasant about it, but spam's a really bad idea.

Finally, if you're wondering where the term "spamming" came from, it came
from a Monty Python sketch in which the characters were in a restaurant
which mainly sold Spam. Items on the menu included things like "Spam,
Spam, Spam, eggs, ham, and Spam." Whenever the waitress recited the menu,
a group of Vikings in the corner would chime in with her, chanting the
word "Spam" over and over, drowning out everything else.

Some members of the media have spread the explanation that the word
"spamming" derives from throwing chunks of Spam into a fan. This is not
where the term comes from.
-----------------------8<----------------------8<------------------------
I've seen that attributed, somewhere, but the attribution fell off on
it's way to me.  If anyone knows who wrote it, I'd like to know.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                        j...@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us
Member of the Technical Staff                    Junk Mail Will Be Billed For.
The Suncoast Freenet      *FLASH: Craig Shergold aw'better; call 800-215-1333*
Tampa Bay, Florida    http://members.aol.com/kyop/rhps.html    +1 813 790 7592