Comments welcome by email. I don't care if you disagree with me but name-calling and cussing are not acceptable. Comments that are just rude and not relevant will not be posted.
Increasingly over the past few months, antispyware products have become a staple of unsolicited advertising e-mails, often sent by affiliates of a software developer rather than the developer itself.
It became clear that the dirty little secret in the escalating war between spammers and anti-spammers isn't that your e-mail may never get read. It may never get delivered.
New technology aside, I'm watching a growing alliance between spammers, computer hackers and organized crime. This is a business relationship that bodes poorly for us all.
The Federal Trade Commission warned consumers yesterday not to register with a Web site that claims to be the "National Do Not E-Mail Registry" and mimics the style of the national no-call Web site.
On the receiving end, participating ISPs use Goodmail Systems' Stamp Filtering Gateway to detect and validate the stamps and allow the validated messages to bypass spam prevention technologies, thereby eliminating false positives and allowing legitimate volume mailers to interact with consumers in a reliable, trusted manner.
Goodmail's criteria for determining who is a "legitimate" bulk mailer:
First, support Goodmail Systems' efforts to verify their individual or corporate identity. Needless to say, simply entering a credit card number won't allow a prospective buyer to purchase a million stamps.
Second, agree that their unsubscribe mechanism will be reliable and cooperate with Goodmail Systems' efforts to monitor and enforce that unsubscribe mechanism.
Third, pay one cent per message.
I note that they don't say one damn word about how the addresses the mail is being sent to were collected in the first place, which is the #1 most harped on point by spamfighters.
I don't care if the company sending the spam is real. Pornographers, for instance, run real companies but I still don't want ads for their products.
I don't care if they'll actually unsubscribe me. Why should I have to unsubscribe from something I didn't subscribe to in the first place?!
I certainly don't care how much they're paying somebody else. They want to pay me directly—and it had better be way more than a penny per ad!—we'll talk.
Getting right down to brass tacks, if I didn't sign up for your mailing list, I don't want to be on it!
