Spam Replacing Postal Junk Mail?

TheOtherChimeraTwin writes "I've been getting spam from mainstream companies that I do business with, which is odd because I didn't give those companies my email address. It is doubly strange because the address they are using is a special-purpose one that I wouldn't give out to any business. Apparently knotice.com ('Direct Digital Marketing Solutions') and postalconnect.net aka emsnetwork.net (an Equifax Marketing Service Product with the ironic name 'Permission!') are somehow collecting email addresses and connecting them with postal addresses, allowing companies to send email instead of postal mail. Has anyone else encountered this slimy practice or know how they are harvesting email addresses?"

Man, the lumber cartel is NOT going to like THIS

[__aavhli5779]

( TINLC )

Re:Man, the lumber cartel is NOT going to like THI

[Anonymous Coward]

As a lumber company executive I want to make aware our great misfortune, and hate to have to do this but Mr. Obama... We need OUR bailout too!

What I do...

[Mr. Conrad]

I just handle electronic spam like normal junk mail. Hit Ctrl+P and then throw the damn thing away. Good riddance.

Re:E-mail is Preferable, it can be Filtered

[fl!ptop]

if they are going to continue annoying us then I would prefer that it be through email and not postal mail

i disagree, with postal spam at least if they provide a pre-paid return envelope i have the satisfaction of putting everything they sent me in that envelope, along w/ a few rusty washers (to add weight), and maybe a sunday paper glossy ad or two (more weight, and thickness) and sending it back to them on their dime.

Re:Do you shop online?

[Anonymous Coward]

My standard email address for sites I dont wish to give my real details to is [e-mail]

I used to give the local recycling centre as my real address.

Re:E-Stamps, the only way to reduce spam

[Matt Perry]

E-stamps are the only effective way to reduce spam. Bulk spammers will go from paying something like 0.1 cents per message to say 25-cents, making it uneconomical, and more trace-able. When you buy an e-stamp, 1/3 of the amount goes to the recipient (usually as credit), 1/3 to the ISP, and 1/3 to a monitoring agency. "Approved" recipients could send for free.

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re:have your own domain-get universal forwarding

[Anonymous Coward]

Which RFC, though?

821 (from 1982) does not allow it.
822 (also 1982) does.
2821 and 2822 (2001) also respectively don't and do.

Ancient relics. It's all about RFCs 5321 and 5322. Don't you get a feed of all the latest RFCs?

Re:have your own domain-get universal forwarding

[93 Escort Wagon]

Ancient relics. It's all about RFCs 5321 and 5322. Don't you get a feed of all the latest RFCs?

I've got it set up as a podcast in iTunes.

Re:I had enough

[nomadic]

I have 13 e-mail addresses. E-mail the public one, and you get sent a riddle, which if you answer correctly gets you the next e-mail address. Each riddle is more fiendish than the last, and nobody has reached the 13th e-mail address.

Egham is "spam capital" of UK

[David Gerard]

Email filtering company MessageLabs reports that Egham, Surrey, on the suburban outskirts of London, is the town that receives the most spam in Britain [today.com].

"It's not like there's much else to do," said Boris Busybody, 77 (IQ), of Egham Hythe, idly whirling his four-foot penis around his head in a desultory fashion. "Expanding your manhood, growing your breasts, increasing your sperm ... the Lib Dem phone calls get a bit much. That's Doctor Busybody, by the way. My Ph.D arrived last week."

Spam has revitalised the local economy. Mr Busybody has given up cab driving and is now working a lucrative job processing payments from home after he sent them his bank details in response to an urgent security message. "I had that King Otumfuo Opoku Ware II in the back of my cab once. Very generous and helpful fellow."

The Egham Tourist Board has seized the day, with plans for a 50 foot tall penis sculpture at Junction 13 of the M25 on the exit ramp to the town. The sculpture will be encircled by a genuine imitation Rolex and spray a fountain of Spermamax, obtained at a very reasonable rate from a Canadian pharmacy. "You will search an hour for your underwear in the ocean of our spam!" is to become the new town motto.

"I did get a good one the other day," says Busybody. "Barrister Matthew Sergeant Busybody of MessageLabs said we could promote our town to millions of people just by sending them an advance fee to process our incoming email. The stuff they try! 'Scuse me, V!k@grk@ kicking in, got to go have sex again. Sorry."

Re:Popular Domain?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, does Gmail post any new email addresses in a sort of anonymous phone book, or was my user name easy to guess (I had used the same set of letters and numbers on very many sites before I got the Gmail account)? I don't know, but in my case, the popular domain seemed to bring spam.

Err, sorry. I've been using [e-mail] as my fake email address for years whenever I buy viagra.

Re:E-mail is Preferable, it can be Filtered

[mauthbaux]

i disagree, with postal spam at least if they provide a pre-paid return envelope i have the satisfaction of putting everything they sent me in that envelope, along w/ a few rusty washers (to add weight), and maybe a sunday paper glossy ad or two (more weight, and thickness) and sending it back to them on their dime.

Obligatory bash.org anecdote:

#127039 +(10530)- [X]
[wolf] 1. Save every Free Credit Card Offer you get, Put it in pile A
[wolf] 2. Save every Free Coupon You get, put that in pile B
[wolf] 3. Now open the credit card mail from pile A and find the Business Reply Mail Envelope.
[wolf] 4. Take the coupons from pile B and stuff them in the envelope you hold in your hand.
[wolf] 5. Drop the stuffed to the brim envelopes in your mail and walk away whistling.
[wolf] I have now received two phone calls from the credit card companies telling me that they received a stuffed envelope with coupons rather then my application. They informed me that it they are not pleased that they footed the bill for the crap I sent them. I reply with "It says Business Reply Mail" I'm suggesting coupons to you to ensure that your business is more successful. They promptly hang up on me.
[wolf] Now, I did this for about a month before it got boring, so I got an added idea! I added exactly 33 cents worth of pennies to the envelope so they paid EXTRA due to the weight. I got a call informing me about the money, I said it was a mistake and I demanded my change back. After yelling at the clerk and then to the supervisor they agreed to my demands and cut me a check for the money. I hold in my hand at this very moment a check from GTE Visa for exactly 33 cents.

[e-mail]

[Anonymous Coward]

I have my own domain too, and there have been times it's been nothing but embarrassment.