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Spam

Get Spam From Your Friends 77

Posted by timothy from the wonders-never-cease dept.
ncc74656 writes: "CNET has this story about Revo Networks and its Admail system. Unlike most spam, which gets sent to you as a separate (and filterable) message, Admail would modify all of your incoming mail by attaching spam to it. Want to read your email? You're stuck getting the ads as well. It's being pitched to ISPs and webmail providers, as it can be applied to both webmail and POP3 accounts. And you thought you had enough spam clogging your mailbox already ..." Of course, most if not all of the free webmail services do add a line of spam to the top or bottom of all messages sent ...
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Get Spam From Your Friends More

Get Spam From Your Friends

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  • Re:Host your own mail (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's assuming your ISP doesn't block 25 (SMTP) for anything but their own mail servers. More are blocking it every day :(

  • Spam Lords (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Prompted by the last SPAM article I saw on /., I decided to do a little test.

    I signed up for a new hotmail acount and nothing else. I sent no mail, I gave the address to no one!
    After 2 days, I checked the account. I had received 25+ articles of SPAM!!

    Here is what hotmail's privacy policy says about SPAM:
    Hotmail: No "Spam"
    We do not tolerate our members being the victims of unsolicited e-mail (aka "spam"). We are equally intolerant of Hotmail members sending junk e-mail. Sending junk e-mail from a Hotmail account is cause for that account's termination.

    Hotmail promotes responsible Net Commerce and is actively boycotting unsolicited e-mail. Our efforts to fight unsolicited e-mail on the Internet have been noticed by organizations such as spam.abuse.net, who find Hotmail's anti-spam policy to be aggressive and effectual.

    No one new that email address, accept for a database tucked away somewhere behind that policy!!
    I wonder what spam.abuse.net would think of that?.... See it for yourself at Hotmail Policy [passport.com]

  • This is assuming of course that you didn't give them prior permission to insert their junk, as you most likely would have done. Yahoo's free webmail for example inserts a line at the top and bottom of the mail, but this is perfectly legal because it is authorized in the agreement in which you get the free email account of the first place. I don't see anything wrong with this really - if you really don't want the ads, pay for a service without them.
  • I'm not so sure about that. Depending on how it's formatted, it could be argued that the original mail is being presented unaltered, and an ad is being displayed *in addition to* the email. I don't see how making it text is different than displaying an ad banner in the window or something.

    Note that ISPs already *do* alter messages as they travel, adding on Received: headers and the like.

  • Re:Yet another reason . . . (Score:3)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Saturday June 23, 2001 @07:15AM (#131260)
    I tried this approach. I registered a domain name. I figured out how host that domain name on my dynamic IP address (assigned via PPPoE). I downloaded, installed and learnt about Debian.

    Within a month my ISP had started deploying a port 25 filter :(. They claim it's to combat SPAM originating from their network. It seems that this is a popular tactic of many large ISPs. What BS. Like many other people, I'm looking for an alternative ISP.
  • Thanks to the US government [bbspot.com].


    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
  • For those with constant connections, you may want to consider doing this. All you need to do is set up DNS and sendmail on a P-75, register a domain, and you're golden. They can't force ads down your throat if you don't let them, that way.
    Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
  • Nah, it's for MSN Explorer. It's like IE, except it AOLizes the web for you. Sorta slick, I have to admit. It seems popular among grandparents. I'd actually recommend it to mine, because everything they use most is right up in front.
  • This has to be one of the more disgusting ideas I've heard of yet in the put-more-unsolicited-ads-in-our-face campaign. I honestly feel it's tolerable to have little blurbs at the bottom of an email like Yahoo or Hotmail. (Yahoo actually provides a number of free, useful services after all) But actually having full color ads attached to email? This sounds like a sure-fire loser to me. I can just imagine forwarding a message to my boss and it happens to have that X-10 "semi-naked" woman and a little "hidden" camera in the picture embedded in the email. No way.

    I bet this will further clog email servers all across the country, the ad content will likely take up more bandwidth than the actual messages themselves.

    Congratulations, Revo Networks. Another genuinely stupid idea on how to get try to force more SPAM into our daily life. Have fun going out of buisness, I'd sooner pay a few $$ for ad-free services than resort to having big ads IN my email.

    (If I could find contact info for revo networks, I would send them a hate-mail already.)

    Brett
  • Their right to free speech stops when they're speaking over my personal, private communications with someone else.
  • Still happens---we just bought AvidDV to run on a Wintel box* and it came with a dongle.

    * It's running NT Workstation. I know, pain. But Avid is like an OS unto itself anyway.

    ----

  • Re:Yet another reason . . . (Score:5)

    by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) <scott@alfter.us> on Sunday June 24, 2001 @02:57PM (#131267) Homepage Journal
    I tried this approach. I registered a domain name. I figured out how host that domain name on my dynamic IP address (assigned via PPPoE). I downloaded, installed and learnt about Debian.

    Within a month my ISP had started deploying a port 25 filter :(. They claim it's to combat SPAM originating from their network. It seems that this is a popular tactic of many large ISPs. What BS. Like many other people, I'm looking for an alternative ISP.

    Assuming that you're on some sort of broadband connection, see if you can get a static IP address. You might need to switch from residential to commercial service, but you can generally do what you want with a static IP.

    I set up a mail server on a dynamic IP through Cox [lvcm.com] about a year and a half ago. It worked fine on that until they rolled out DOCSIS [com21.com] service for residential users. At that time, they blocked inbound port 25 to dynamic IPs; I learned of it when I stopped receiving email one day. :-P Previously, both residential and commercial users were issued COM21 [com21.com] modems...now COM21 modems are only issued to commercial users, though residential users who already had them were grandfathered in. In any case, there's no difference in cost at the lowest service levels between residential and commercial accounts, but static IPs ($10 each) are only available for commercial accounts. If the difference in cost isn't outrageous in your area, it's an option to consider.

  • Phone up your ISP and ask to have the port un-blocked. Many ISPs have default blocks that they will remove if you ask them nicely.
    ------

  • Earthlink is already spamming its own users and no amount of complaining seems to deter them. They've been sending me ads disguised as "newsletters" -- and I assume that this is the tactic other ISPs will be using shortly. I will be cancelling that account today (Monday), since they have not responded to my complaint. But seriously, does anyone think they will care? I'd like to think that others will follow suit and tell'em to go to Hell, but I suspect the vast bulk will meekly accept it -- and that is what Earthlink is banking on.

    PS. The only reason I used them in the first place was cuz they bought out my local Mom-n-Pop ISP. I'm well aware of their reputation for harboring other spammers.

  • come to think of it.. attaching ads is changing the content, and could possibly be a copyright violation.

    //rdj

  • You get what you (don't) pay for (Score:3)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Saturday June 23, 2001 @05:33AM (#131271) Homepage Journal
    As far as I can see from the article, the primary intent of this is for providers of free e-mail services - they get to make money by advertising to their users.

    I am sure that the general reaction here will be one of horror and anger, let us remember that the users of these systems choose to use them and that you get what you pay for. If you are too cheap/broke to pay for a real e-mail account, you have to suffer the consequences of your choice.

    However, I think this sort of thing will tank just as all previous advertiser supported systems have. People who want to receive e-mail will get a real account, and the people who are too cheap to do so are a really lousy marketing demographic.

    I give it three years. Tops.

  • And then there was this absolute howler... (Score:4)

    by asako ( 73529 ) on Sunday June 24, 2001 @04:50PM (#131272) Homepage

    The last paragraph of the article:

    "Advertisers are reluctant to be associated with anything that irritates consumers," [Charles Britton] said. "There's not many successful business models based on annoying people."

    Would somebody please explain this to the inventors of popup ads?

  • your friends ISPs start to add Spam to the bottom of their outgoing email, and your ISP also adds one to the bottom of your incoming email?
    Not to mention any other other networks the messages pass through...
  • I do this except I don't have a static IP on my ADSL at home so I do it at work. Only thing is that I use postfix [postfix.org] :)

    AussiePenguin
    Melbourne, Australia
    ICQ 19255837

  • If it falls under copyright at all, then in Australia you won't be needing the X-Copyright header as everything you write is copyrighted unless you specifically specify it to be in the public domain.

    AussiePenguin
    Melbourne, Australia
    ICQ 19255837

  • I don't see how a busienss model like this will work!

    Real ISPs won't buy into it. And free ISPs can already do it. And probably don't need the consultation of another company to do it for them.

    And then there are people like me who have their own mail servers.

    But still, what gives... anyone in Melbourne want to help me track down this Pickup guy? And with name like that I would have thought he would have had more success running a pickup truck business!

    AussiePenguin
    Melbourne, Australia
    ICQ 19255837

  • Yet another reason . . . (Score:4)

    by Floyd Turbo ( 84609 ) on Saturday June 23, 2001 @05:13AM (#131277) Journal
    To run your own mail server if at all possible. This sort of vile nonsense is likely to keep getting worse, but it won't matter a bit if you receive your email through a server you control.
    --
  • I can't imagine this will fly with paid-for ISP's though...imagine the Post Office opening up your snailmail and placing post-it notes on your letter from grandma, or, stamping hotmail-esque ads on the envelope itself. Just not gunna happen (but it does, you can bet there's a huge demand for countermeasures.)

    I thought about this analogy, but there is a fundamental difference between email and snailmail. Tampering with snailmail is a federal offense, tampering with email is not.

    I do wonder though if ISP's that tamper with email could be sued under an implied warranty of privacy or some such lawyer speak. That is, unless specifically stated in an ISP's TOS, one could argue that tampering with customers email messages violates their privacy, it would be similar to the phone company adding commercials to your telephone calls or voicemail messages.

  • Geocities used to do this like 5 years ago. They would give a free '@geocities.com' pop3 mail, and all mails had an ad on them, like

    <center>This mail paid by
    [a small image of the sponsor]</center>

    on the top. They stoped doing it a long time ago too.

    --

  • I work for a mid-sized ISP and we don't give out addresses to anyone but new accounts still get spammed. Why? Because someone sees our domain names and begins sending mail to common letter combinations and common names, guess what? They hit real addresses all the time.

    When I was using hotmail back in the day I often got spams that had my first name and tons of last names appended to it my email address being my first_lastname I would get the spam. I don't know if hotmail is selling addresses or not but I do know that alot of spam comes from an educated guess.

    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Hotmail has been putting advertising footers for years. Egroups puts banner adds on the bottom of all messages going through their mailing lists.
  • If they do this they had better pay me for placing an ad attached to my outgoing email.

    It would also force me to digitally sign all email and insist that all people wanting me to read their email do the same. Anything outside the signed block matching the sender would be stripped and tossed.

    cheers, AndrewN

  • for perhaps my Hotmail account, which I use to keep spam out of my work account anyway.

    Even better, I'd like the fact that I could send fresh new original spam back to spammers.

    Yes I did mean to opt out 27 times in one day.
  • I already run a mail server "somewhere else", and sined up for Mindspring just to have a local dial-up. I never gave my Mindspring address away to anyone, as I did not intend to use it for anything but communication with Mindspring.

    From day one, I received *exactly* one spam per day on that account. Mind you, Mindspring also boasts their oh so effective Spaminator.

  • We'll just put together a class action lawsuite agaist the ISPs and advertivers, for the same reason why we'll sue MS if the smarttags are in place; the email is copyrighted and they're inserting their junk.
  • I seem to remember hearing about a telephone service a while back that was free but would interrupt your call every few minutes with an advert.

    Services have to be paid for somehow, and if advertising is the only way then I am happy to live with it... of course if I am already paying my ISP for my email account I wouldn't be happy about this at all - but for a free extra pop account (which I can stick as my nntp return address and is mainly spam anyway) then its a great idea.
  • I recieved spam from earthlink on an account that noone had the email address to. I don't even use the account for any purpose other than my monthly bill reciept from them. I also pose another interesting theory - what if ISPs have moles that are selling current user lists to spam houses? It seems to be the case.
  • Listbot, after going overboard with lines of ads, are now going pay-per-mail [listbot.com]. Anyone know of a good gratis mailing list provider (not MSN or Yahoo)?
    --
    mrBlond (I don't email from Malaysia)
  • I really am sick and tired of the loads of spam that I get every day. I've been e-mailing senders and forwarders of spam for some time now, but it doesn't seem to help shit. I'm particularly angry about the ad for Winfix, that I get almost daily. I e-mailed these suckers, plus the contact address of the domain from which it was sent, plus the ISP which forwarded it, but none of them replied.

    I wondered what could be done about this and /. inspired me for a solution. How about slashdotting spammers? I suppose I'm not the only one how keeps getting this Winfix ad (first thing I found when I entered winfix in AltaVista, was a number of pages about this very ad) and I think it would make quite an impression if all /. would send these jerks a few messages, telling them to quit spamming. How about it? Maybe an idea for an extra topic on Slashdot: top 10 spammers. A page containing names of spammers and the ads they distribute. Accompanied, of course, by some addresses where to contact them so that all the world can tell them to get their hands off of our mailboxes.

  • It's quite funny that C|Net is covering this story about the ads being placed in the middle of email, on a news page with a large ad placed right in the middle...
  • I'd suggest forwarding all your spam-containing messages to: root@, abuse@, sales@, support@, admin@, sysop@ both YOUR isp and the SENDER'S ---> You missed the point. This spam would be embedded into email sent to you by others. Do you really want to forward copies of your PERSONAL email to every Joe Blow on your mail delivery path? (Not that they couldn't read it anyway if they wanted to, but you would be actually dropping it into their mailbox this way.)

    That type of response is great for "normal" spam. But spam contained within otherwise "private" correspondence? I think another approach would be required.
  • If I send you email, I didn't give anybody permission to dick with my intellectual property. It doesn't matter what agreement you signed.
  • I already filter email from various mailing lists and other quasi-spam opt-in operations like the Wall Street Journal Interactive. I run it from a procmail rule for example

    :0 Hbf
    * ^TOtopica.com
    | ${DETAG}

    I tried to post the code, but the lameness filter dinged it. Figgers. The first genuinely useful thing I've done in years, and Slashdot deems it "lame."

  • Of course, most if not all of the free webmail services do add a line of spam to the top or bottom of all messages sent

    My favorite example of this is hotmail, who continues to add a notice about "Click here for MS Internet Explorer" to their email. Is there anybody on the planet who will receive that mail and say, "Internet Explorer...never heard of it. Better click there, sounds interesting."

  • I don't know about the US, but in the UK, they've just repealed a 100 year old law which banned telephony workers from interfering with or altering messages passed over their network. I wondered why they had done that. It's all become clear now :-(
  • "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters."

    krystal_blade

  • Hey dumbass marketing people, get a clue.

    We don't want to look at advertising. We're trying to conduct our business and our lives here.

    Seriously, all this is going to do is force me to use up more hard drive space for archiving my old mail messages. I'm still not going to actually read these ads. I've already mastered the art of skimming, honed through years of websurfing on sites where the signal to noise ratio is pathetically low.

    I guess I can only look forward to the day where instead of receiving your email, you get a ransom note, saying that if you don't buy products from Company X right now, you'll never see your messages again.

    Hey, I know! How about developing a system which shows you an advertisement which covers up the real content of the email message, and in order to unlock it, you have to score above a certain threshold on a reading comprehension exam. I can see it now...

    1. How long does this great offer last? (Click on the appropriate answer):
      [ ] 3 days, but act now!
      [ ] 7 days, but act now!
      [ ] Offer subject to change or withdrawal with or without notice, so act now!
    2. What is the cost of this service?
      [ ] Not $100!
      [ ] No, not even $50!
      [ ] The low, low price of $19.95!

    Etc. Anyone else feel like puking?

  • I'd call it really fucking stupid, and I work for an ISP! Only free mail providers like Yahoo would use this .. and they already do, so in that way it isn't news. If my emails suddenly got ads attached, I'd switch ISPs the very same hour.
  • I can't wait to report MY OWN FRIENDS to their ISPs for spamming me...

    I can't wait for every ISP who subscribes to this technology to be blackholed...

    Most of all, I can't wait until spamming is punishable by death...

  • I wonder if you could successfully work the angle that your correspondence is protected under copyright law. Spam added to an email and sent in its place is an unauthorized derivative work, allowing legal action against the spammer.

  • If any ISP alters the content of my mail 'envelope' I'm calling it an invasion of privacy.
  • There is almost no faster way to get me to switch ISP's. If I am paying for the service, then the customer is always right and has a vote. I always vote with my pocketbook. Why do you think copy protection, dongles and such had a bad time. Lots of people voted it down. Are you old enough to remember when software came with a hardware dongle? Remember how fast it was returned? Get a clue.
  • Notice that for a while Amiga Video Toaster was the leader. Notice Macintosh is still a leader in AV? Kofax is in a niche market. If MS word tried it, Wordperfect and Star Office would get a big boost and Microsoft knows it! That is why they are trying to use the fingerprint of the machine as a dongle instead of shipping one. It's also getting lots of consuer flack. Watch how well it doesn't sell after hardware upgrades breaks it and the word gets out.
  • and discard unencrypted parts if an encrypted part is present.
    • All you need to do is set up DNS and sendmail on a P-75, register a domain, and you're golden.
    I did this for about a week, when I received a bounced email pointing me to the MAPS Dialup User List [mail-abuse.org]. Basically, they know you're on a dynamic IP, and thus have a high potential of being a spammer. It was an AOL address that bounced. Over the next week a few more messages bounced, from various ISPs...

    I was originally pissed, but considering that most spammers find morons to run their spam software (which is basically a list server that makes direct connections to SMTP servers), it's understandable. The ISPs don't want dialup users connecting directly into their mail servers to send them mail.

    It's too difficult to hold a dynamic IP accountable when tons of spam is sent through it. Complaints to that ISP (owning the dynamic IP) only cause that ISP to block ports. Leaving it open causes people to use the MAPS list mentioned above.

    As for the original topic, I don't see this as anything new at all. I'm sure I have megs of "Do you Yahoo?" in my inbox, and I don't see how this is any different. If you don't like it, find a better ISP.

    Unless this is talking about the opposite direction, which I just realized might be the case... where ads are attached to your outgoing messages (targeting your recipients)... If that is the case, then I'm opposed. But, the same rules apply -- if you don't like it, don't use their services. If you're receiving the ads, tell the sender not to mail you until he gets a better ISP.

    And in any case, I agree with another post that mentioned that this is just a bad idea in general; target users of a "free ISP", you're wasting ad dollars on people who are too cheap to spend $10/mo for a decent ISP.

    - Jman
  • JAMES (The Java Apache Mail Enterprise Server) is a 100% pure Java server, designed to be a complete and portable enterprise mail engine solution based on currently available open protocols (SMTP, POP3, IMAP,HTTP).
    http://jakarta.apache.org/james/index.html
  • actually, we do want them to go away :)
  • " Of course, most if not all of the free webmail services do add a line of spam to the top or bottom of all messages sent ... " That's why I use MyRealBox - it just might be the only one that doesn't.
  • They say they're talking to ISP's, which would suggest it's something they'll need to implement on a system that already has users with email accounts....

    Unless they specifically tell their users to go read any new end-user agreements (unlikely given past experiences), they'll probably implement this without users knowing.

    Which brings to mind a story a while back about that law in Australia that got passed about messages being copyright.

    Wouldn't adding anything to a user's message be a copyright violation by the ISP? (unless they tell their users, but see my above remark about this)

  • Just stop using the service if it appends adds to your incoming emails.

    Just put up a filter that mails back some kind of "sorry I did _NOT_ receive your email because you are using an evil spamming mail service. Consider changing your service provider" to people who use those services who append BS to their mails.

    Of course appending one single line to outgoing emails on free accounts is pretty much ok, as you're not paying anything and agreed to it anyway.. but I'd definitely put up some filter if those bastards start sending out html mails with banners attached and such.
  • I can understand how this would be implemented on a web-based mail system, since you are actually *composing* the message on their server, using whatever script/component they are running.

    However, if this were to be implemented on an ISP level, by adding advertisements to outgoing email messages, I would suggest you add an X-Copyright header to your mail! This coupled with using PGP [pgpi.org] or GnuPG [gnupg.org], and cryptographically signing your email would enable the receiver to see if the mail had been tampered with (the message hash would have changed, and the authentication would fail) and you could attack the ISP for invasion of privacy or mail tampering.

    This greatly disturbs me for many reasons. The commercialisation of the Internet will soon reach its peak, and dreadfully our entire desktops will be filled with gigantic advertisements promoting pornography or silly little trinkets. As if this wasn't bad enough our emails would be full of tags like " WIN WIN WIN 10000$ WIN WIN WIN "

    Fight now, your desktop might be too clogged to fight later!

    May the source be with you.

  • Who's to say only those "free" ISPs are going to use this? I seriously doubt companies like AOL are not salivating over this idea. Thirty-million eyeballs for their marketers to monetize...

    Also, as to the commercial value of an email: If a company is mailing product offers (legit or spam) to people for say, cheap internet access, and AOL tagged the email with their own ads, wouldn't this amount to possible commercial damages?

  • If your ISP does this, just don't use their POP server, and let them know why. I have AT&T Broadband access (the company that runs about four TV commercials per hour advertising itself, on its own cable systems), but I don't use their mailserver I get mail from the same place my website [jraxis.com] is hosted [kracked.com].
  • I think several people are reading this too quickly. I see comments below about people saying how Hotmail, et. al., does this already. Read the article again. This spam technique would attach ads to your
    INCOMING
    mail. Meaning all mail sent to you by anyone, when it hits your inbox, would get junk appended to it by the ISP's server. This would probably violate the sender's privacy rights, since whereas you may "agree" to let your ISP tag your mail when you agreed to the TOS/AUP, the sender of these mails didn't agree to let their mail be modified by your ISP.
  • Okay, let's skip a few steps of the usual market-driven evolution process and jump right to the final product form. ISPs should filter out all non-business content that flows through their routers. The only bytes that should be allowed on the Internet are those whose purpose is to make money. Every word of content will automatically be copyrighted. Recipients will be charged a per-byte fee, with a flat percentage going to the various carriers along the line and the rest divided amongst the rights holders. Then I think the Internet will finally have achieved its golden, sacred purpose, and everybody wasting bandwidth engaging in non-profitable pursuits can go back to envelopes and stamps.
  • Let's see here...Interent end-users don't want to see advertising in their mailboxes, on the webpages, or anywhere else.

    Advertising agencies don't understand that we don't want to see their ads.

    Somebody cooks up yet another way to get advertising from people who "don't get it" to people who don't want to see adverts. Then they make a company to sell it.

    I can't wait for this company to tank. The only thing that I can't understand is why a technical person (presumably a person who uses the Internet) would actually want to work for a company where their job is to devise new ways to pump spam to people who don't want it. Just goes to show you that the world is full of whores.
  • Don't they know if the ads get worse we are just going to hold the company placing the ad resposible.

    If I see an ad on my INCOMING e-mail about VA Linux Systems [just an example]- then I will never buy one fucking thing from them.

    I'd only be pissed off at them. Even though they aren't the ones that came up with the idea, they just bought into it.

    Only the weak and old respond to spam and pop-ups. The rest of us just end up hateing the 'sponser'.
  • come to think of it.. attaching ads is changing the content, and could possibly be a copyright violation.

    I've read this several times in this thread. Apparently, people don't realize that even though email is technically copyrighted, there is no legal avenue if that copyright is broken because it has no commercial value.

    10 Big Myths about copyright explained [templetons.com]

    But, as has been said before, if you don't like it, don't use a free ISP. If you don't want your email modified, don't send it to someone at a free ISP.
  • DeaR reCipieNT,

    yOu haVE beeN GiVEN manY OppURtunItiES tO puRchASE proDuct X viA thE MILlioNS of emAilS YOu reCieVE eAch wEEk. You HAVe refuSED. We NOw HavE YoUR EmaiLS RansOM. If YOu FAil to puRChasE braND X by SundOWn FridAY usINg InterNET eXplorER 5.01 or HigHER WitH WindOWs 2000 SeCURity SETtings MimIMUm... You'LL neVeR SeE youR EmailS agAiN ;)). You ARe PRevEnTIng Us froM UsinG You As a StatiStIC. We HOPe YoU wiLL dO the riGhT ThinG.

  • OK (Score:1)

    by bwldrbst ( 305640 )

    Give me some contact details so I can send them a pricing schedule.

  • Aren't some secure mail transport mechanisms dependent upon a form of checksumming of the bytes in the body, to ensure that the message has not been compromised? By definition, it seems that any mail agent that tacks on material to the message body would break secure transport.
  • Oh good and I bet AOL is going to be the first ISP to jump at this. They already give you enough advertising anyway. Well looks like I'll just add all the ISPS to the RBL list:)
  • "If any ISP alters the content of my mail 'envelope' I'm calling it an invasion of privacy. "

    Would you? I'd call it stupid and switch ISPs. Or set up my own mail server (which ever caught my fancy at the time).

    ----------------------------------------

  • since most (read: all) advertising is graphical, I do most of my web surfing in lynx/links/w3m depending on my mood I read my webmail with lynx and my POP mail with Pine (see: http://freshmeat.net) I don't get ads. I've given up on getting spam banned, and that wouldn't be enough since spam does not include pop ups/banners on web sites --Surfers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose except your ads--
  • So SPAM is not only free speech (according to the ever-patronizing Dick Gephardt), but now they can just put words in your mouth, say by writing the "ad" as a P.S. or a very clever sentence.
    --------------------
    By the way, I totally love Vermont Teddybears. If you love me, send me one! 1-800-555-SPAM
  • "Of course, most if not all of the free webmail services do add a line of spam to the top or bottom of all messages sent ..."

    And of course, if they didn't, services like Hotmail would go out of business. (beginning sarcasm) And we all want services like Hotmail to go out of business, right? (ending sarcasm)

  • Their freedom of speech stops at the SMTP envelope. Could you imagine postal service mailboxes where advertisers opened your mail and droped an ad in it before passing it on to the postal service for delivery? It's illegal for others to open my snail mail, the same should stand for email.
  • People are getting pissed, but the marketing geniuses don't seem to care, and they also don't seem to realize that the "opt-out s/w market" is growing. Thanks to software, the marketroids no longer have a guaranteed captive audience.

    Increasing numbers of people now browse through localhost "junkbuster" web proxys in order to increase their signal to noise ratio.

    For email, its been easy enough to trash the distict spam messages with simple filters, like: "subject contains "FREE", or two or more exclaimations, or contains 10+ consecutive spaces, or is longer than 80 chars," which takes care of 90% of my spam.

    But, if ISP's actually started inserting inline ads -- and people couldn't vote down that (monopolistic) ISP with their dollars -- we'd need yet another proxy between the mail-client and junkmail-server to filter out the junk midstream.

    I can't imagine this will fly with paid-for ISP's though...imagine the Post Office opening up your snailmail and placing post-it notes on your letter from grandma, or, stamping hotmail-esque ads on the envelope itself. Just not gunna happen (but it does, you can bet there's a huge demand for countermeasures.)

  • This is just the latest example in the growing list of the ways corporations and big businesses are getting more and more involved in the internet. To them, everything is about money and they see the internet as just another way to make money, whether they're invading privacy or not. The only way they'll stop is if they get a serious backlash from their users and a lot of people on the internet today are too blind to even notice what's going on, much less do anything about it. So as long as the internet remains in wide usage and blind idiots use e-mail, corporations will be more than happy to litter their services with ads because the fact is, not enough people click on banner ads so they have to find alternate ways of generating cash, otherwise what are they in it for?
  • We don't want to look at advertising. We're trying to conduct our business and our lives here.
    True, but as some of our esteemed Senators have pointed out, Corporations have freedom of speech as well.
  • I've been reading your comments on this (I'm the tech who designed and developed the software). I don't want to get too involved in the ethics of this, I'll admit they are somewhat dubious, but they are just ads. If you want to ask any "tech" questions (or just flame away) send me a mail.
  • Yes the "spam" goes in the body of the mail, and yes it will be somewhat difficult, for a machine, to filter it.

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