[OT] Why is Email spam illegal?

[nobby]

Though my College course in Business studies with E-commerce and I.T, I came to the conclusion that the best form of advertising online, is essentially spam !

However it has put me into a pit of wondering and questioning "legal methods of sending spam"

Why are there such laws in Place anyway?

We get cold callers on the bloody telephone every day, selling every shit and shit product, we can Avoid this by going ex-directory.

Local newspapers and leaflets, put through our doors every week, use up trees and each day are thought of a nuisance and put into the bin.

However a form of non existence "bit data" and everyone goes fucking crazy !

I find it troubling that a market sector, essentially, the BEST form of marketing for any business is killed off by non-thought through stupid people.

Spam filters can be set up in a space of a second and most email providers give you free spam protection straight away!

I don't care about "damage of spam" when I see it in my inbox, infact I like reading through my spam folder, just to see what crap I've been sent, I especially like the Nigerian email scams I get claiming I've won 25+Million Dollar' ! :)
Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside for a brief minute :p


In the UK, I have found the only way to legally spam, is to send emails to corporate businesses and not private residential homes.


Do "spammers" have any legal method in which such can be partaken without breaking laws?

If people wouldn't whinge as much as to notice how much of an income can EASILY be made from this.. :(

[Hell-demon]

Spam. Thread closed. :rolleyes:

[Brammers]

We get cold callers on the bloody telephone every day, selling every shit and shit product, we can Avoid this by going ex-directory.


There is also the Telephone Preference Service - http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/tps/ All my numbers are on it, and it works for me.



Local newspapers and leaflets, put through our doors every week, use up trees and each day are thought of a nuisance and put into the bin.


I think there is a way to opt-out of this in the UK as well, but as you say...all leaflets, etc I get end up in the recycling bin.



In the UK, I have found the only way to legally spam, is to send emails to corporate businesses and not private residential homes.

Do "spammers" have any legal method in which such can be partaken without breaking laws?

If people wouldn't whinge as much as to notice how much of an income can EASILY be made from this.. :(

None, as if you spam my my email addresses/domains, I'll sue you - meaning I'll be making money from spammers. ;)

On a serrious note, I've got quite a few plugins on my domains that filter email for spam before it reaches my inbox. That uses processing power and time, and energy. So why should I pay for power/time/energy to filter your spam that I didn't ask for or consent to in the first place?

[Conduit]

I think there is a way to opt-out of this in the UK as well, but as you say...all leaflets, etc I get end up in the recycling bin.


Mail preference service (http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/mpsr/)

[rob444]

Some email spam is illegal, some are not.

Your email address is personal, any spam you have not requested is illegal. People believe that an email address equals a street address , this is not true. You could think the same laws apply on emails and phones but that is not the case, emails are more protected by laws. Why there are no stricter phone spam laws I don't know.

Companies that you have a customer relation with can send spam to you, because: You have agreed on it OR there is a paragraph in the law somewhere that allows companies to contact their customers with 'news' (probably varies by country).

Some companies work with 3rd parties and sell your email address to them so they can spam you too. Companies that does this should notify you of this when you sign their agreement. If they have not notified you and they sell your email address, they have breached the contract which is a serious offence.

Email spam is frown upon because it takes up a large amount of the total internet bandwidth, so are viruses. I think this is why they added more laws so they could lower the internet traffic.
I remember reading many years ago, the majority of the bandwidth was used by spam and viruses, luckily todays modern ISPs block known spam/virus traffic so it has been reduced greatly.
Most of the spam comes from infected hosts which uses SMTP relaying to reach their 'potential customers'. From my own personal view (according to my SMTP logs), the majority of the spam comes from Asia (go figure!).

So if you want to spam legally, make sure they sign an agreement with you. One way is to contact a company that stores email address' from their customers and make a deal with them, so that when new customers sign the new agreement, you can spam them freely because they just signed the "allow 3rd parties to send blablabla". Just one of many ideas I guess :P

EDIT: And oh, 1up (some big gaming site) suddenly started sending me spam that I had not requested. I unsubscribed from their news letters but they still kept coming back. I unsubscribed over 15 times and I saved all emails and even took screenshots of me unsubscribing etc.. I then looked up several email address' on 1up and managed to get some. I sent an email to the correct email address, never got a reply, emailed next address, next, next.. and then I emailed the CEO. Still no fucking reply! I was frickin' furious and their stupid news letters kept popping in like it was christmas. So I decided to make it public - I signed up a forum account on their website and wrote the whole story and linked all the evidence and said that I wont be afraid of going further with this (court of law :P), it took them a couple of minutes before my thread was gone. I got a PM pretty much after that from a friendly moderator that told me he had moved it to an invisible sub section and that the appropiate person has been notified and will fix the error for me. After that I've not had a single news letter from them.
Sometimes you have to create a public humiliation to get anywhere these days o_O

[Mr Kot]

E-mail spam isn't illegal unless the product or service being peddled is illegal in its own right. The transaction may constitute fraud or similar if an offer of supply is made with intent to deceive.

Of course, this doesn't prevent an individual or company from instigating civil proceedings where a detriment can be proved.

[tarasm]

Email spam is the shit. I make my living off that. The thing with spamming is if your doing it on a small scale you will be fine, the only thing that might happen is a ban from a cpa network. Right now the feds are after people spamming pharmacy and and porn products.

I spam about 100k-200k emails a day. People are using bot nets right now to spam 100 million emails a day and they are still considered small fish. Even tho spamming is illegal you can do it freely without any consequences.

With that said, I still use a anonymous russian double vpn to connect to my offshore dedicated which is also anonymous, from there I do all my spamming. All the revenue comes in to my overseas bank accounts in Panama. Which makes me a bit anonymous. If the feds try to find you they will.

There is a ton of money to be made with email spamming. Few of my freinds are raking in 10k a day. Some more, others less.

If anyone wants to learn where to get started pm me ill give you a few tips and investment needed to start.

[Hell-demon]

First Nobbies sure fire win stock tips now this :rolleyes:

[Biglines]

i can block all the telemarketeers by subsribing to a central database, I can put a sticker on my door to make sure I get no leaflets, if you make it possible for me to say I don't want your spam, sure, go ahead, but since it is fucking impossible with all the asshats doing it illegally, it has to stay illegal so at least some people get scared off from doing it.
e
oh and another reason why it's illegal, because any straight thinking person doesn't want to have their email boxes filled with crap from the average asshole who wants to make some easy money by spamming (at least leaflets and media advertising cost money, making sure there is at least some way of regulating it)

[Lexxuk]

It's illegal in the US under the canspam act or something, and its quite possible that the email company (hotmail, aol, google, whatever) will take you to court and sue you for more money than you have, and win.

Spam is a problem because we don't want to see "enlarge your penis" or "give your wife the fucking she deserves", lets face it, if the wife wanted a larger penis and the fucking she deserved, she'd sleep with the milkman... again... bitch.

I get some Spam, but my ISP uses the same spam detection tools as google, so it is very rare that I see any spam get through to my inbox (which is a shame, I was having a nice conversation with a guy from Nigeria who was offering me £50,000,000!).

Yes, you can make a lot of money from sending out Spam, but unless that money is in the millions, you will lose every single penny when the people you are spamming take you to court.

If you want to be a spammer nobby, go for it, but you'll find your email address used quickly added to a blacklist, if you go the illegal route of using botnets and zombies to send the email then you're no better than the "enhance your sex life!" people who charge £100 for rat poison, kill the client, no chance of a refund then!

[nobby]

I wasn't thinking of going down the Viagra route, because frankly, you need to send 12.x million to get a single sale.

Viagra emails are automatically sent to spam boxes and everyone knows about viagra spam.

I was thinking more about targeting young teen anorexic susceptible girls in a "Lose weight with Acai berry diets" campaign :p

You know there how simple marketing is, I was Not being serious there because I have an ethical conscious mind.

However I believe a sale is a sale, people will only buy/ sign up if they are generally interested, so why should spam be branded illegal !

You see all sorts of shit on the telly! - look at Cillit bang for example, that's still advertising in a very poor manner.

:D



edit// Let us not forget the fucking crazy frog adverts EVERY 20 Fucking Seconds on the TV !

That was WORSE than spam, but there wasn't a law against that crap !

[Nidhogg]

I was thinking more about targeting young teen anorexic susceptible girls
You know what? I'm seriously losing a lot of respect for some people over this thread so I'm closing it before someone says or does something they might regret later. :/

N