Understanding
Junk Email
Further
information about Junk Email and how it (doesn't) work.
On
This Page
The
Junk Email FAQ Frequently-Asked Questions and answers about junk
email
How
We Should Think About Junk Email Philosophies of (un)acceptability
How
It's Done Know Your Enemy.
Methods
of Address Collection
Auto-Mailers
Chain
Letters and Ponzi (Pyramid) Schemes
Do-Not-Mail
Lists and why they don't work
Big
Net Companies and their Sometimes Unhelpful Attitudes
Other
Resources Links to other anti-junk email sites and related materials
Frequently
Asked Questions About Junk Email
- Q:
What is junk email?
- A: Junk
Email is unsolicited commercial electronic mail. In other words, it
is when someone sends you an unwanted advertisement via email. Often,
junk email is sent in bulk to a large number of addresses using an automated
mailing program.
- Q:
How is junk email different from spam?
- A: Junk
Email is often mis-labeled as Spam. Spam is a name for a excessive multiple
posting of a substantially identical message on Usenet. Spam often contains
commercial advertising, but the definition is based on the number of
postings, and not the content of the message. Because there are effective
filtering and cancel mechanisms available on Usenet, it is becoming
clear to advertisers that spamming is not an effective means of generating
business. Unfortunately, many Net advertisers are now moving to junk
email.
- Q:
Why is this A Bad Thing?
- A: Junk
email requires that the recipient (or victim) pays to receive the advertisement
message, and the victim has no way to avoid doing so. Also, since many
junk emailers use automated mailing programs, and sell their email address
lists, the volume of junk email can quickly rise to unmanageable levels,
clogging the victim's in-box and prevent access to legitimate email.
- Q:
Who does this?
- A: The
short answer is: rude people. Some may not realize that they are being
rude; however, many do. The appeal to them is that junk email appears,
at least on the surface, to be much cheaper than other advertising methods.
Sending an email message appears virtually free to the sender, and a
junk emailer can send email to 10,000 addresses as cheaply as one. Because
of this, even a fraction of a percent positive response is a great return
on investment. Of course, that is overlooking the fact that the other
9,999 people had to be irritated and materially inconvenienced by the
junk email.
- Q:
What if I want to find out about a product?
- A: You
can certainly use Web search engines to find out about products advertised
on the Web. You could also sign up for a specialized mailing list to
be sent information about a particular product or topic, or use a mail-back
email responder. There is no legitimate reason for someone to send you
commercial email without your request or permission.
- Q:
Is commercial email ever OK?
- A: Sure,
if the recipient has knowingly requested the material. This could be
through an auto-responder, or even just a personal exchange of email.
Many businesses distribute information effectively on the Internet this
way.
- Q:
What about junk email that tells you to reply with a keyword in order
to avoid getting further messages?
- A: That's
not good enough. It just wastes more of our valuable time. Valid automated
mailing lists require you to subscribe to them, for good reason: There
are at more than 54,000 known electronic
mailing lists--imagine the chaos if all mailing lists subscribed
everyone on the Net automatically! Would you want to spend the time
sending 54,000 replies?
- Q:
What about putting those "I will proofread junk email for $XXX" contracts
in your .sig file?
- A: Well,
they may act as a deterrent, but they probably aren't legally binding,
because you can't show that the junk emailer actually saw your notice
(and, due to their address-collection software, they probably didn't).
You could send a notification by certified mail (assuming you can get
a valid snail-mail address), send a bill if you got junk emailed again,
and then sue in your local small-claims court when they didn't pay.
This relies on the concept of Notification and Offer, a common-law legal
concept that you have to pay if you do something that costs someone
else money, even if you didn't sign a contract before hand. The commonly-cited
example is when you gas up your car: you are told how much you will
have to pay (and you don't have to accept what is offered to you), but
once you start filling the tank you're on the hook to pay up (that is,
taking the action indicates your acceptance of the offer, which obliges
you to pay). Junkbusters
Spamoff uses this concept to fight junk email.
Note however that I haven't yet heard from anyone who claims to have
successfully collected money this way, but perhaps it is having the
desired deterrent effect. If you have used this tactic successfully,
I would love to hear about it
(you can remain anonymous, if you like).
I am not a lawyer, nor to I play one on the net. This isn't legal advice.
Part of the
reason that people think advertising via junk email is OK is because of
a lack of understanding about the nature of the Net and email in general.
If you misunderstand the way something actually works, you misunderstand
how to use it, and its effects. The way people think about things determines
whether they are considered acceptable.
Like many
things on the Net, it is sometimes helpful to look for similar situations
In Real Life (IRL) for guidance, especially if you are trying to explain
something to people (advertisers) who don't have a lot of net experience.
To that end, there are three analogous situations IRL that we can use
to model strategies to deal with Junk Email: The Telemarketing Model,
the Snail-Mail Model, and the Fax Machine model.
The Telemarketing
Model is based on those annoying telemarketing calls you receive right
around dinner time. In Real Life these are dealt with by hanging up the
phone and returning to dinner, and also by legislation that regulates
the telemarketing industry and provides for a "Do-Not-Call" list (see
"Do-Not-Spam" lists, below. The $500 fine for
calling after the recipient requests no further calls is a nice feature,
as well. This model is not really applicable to Junk Email, because, even
though it is irritating, the recipient does not pay for the sales pitch,
the caller does.
The Snail-Mail
Model is based on bulk advertising rates provided by the US Postal Service.
This can be a useful model to an extent, because the extremely inexpensive
postal rates make even a 1% or 2% response rate economically feasible,
just like the low cost of bulk emailing. But again, the recipient doesn't
have to pay the postage, so this model is not really applicable to junk
email. Unless you can imagine paying postage on all your junk mail!
The Fax Machine
Model is probably the real-world situation that closest resembles junk
email. When someone sends an unsolicited commercial fax, it costs the
recipient money in terms of fax-machine supplies, time, and the blocking
of legitimate faxes. Bulk fax transmittals are certainly more expensive
for the sender than bulk email, but nonetheless the practice of junk faxing
was widespread enough that it was made illegal
under Title 47 of the US Code. This has resulted in the popularity of
the "FAX back" automated fax server, whereby a consumer wanting more information
about a product calls a phone number and keys in their fax number, as
well as code numbers for the documents desired, and these are then sent
to the consumer's fax machine. This can also be accomplished in email,
with autoresponders that send documents based on keywords in the "Subject:"
field or body of a requesting message. This is a much more polite way
to use email to market your product.
There has
even been some
discussion that, under the definition of "fax machine" provided in
the law, a modem-computer-printer setup might fall under the definition
of fax machine, so junk email might also be illegal. This would require
that a court of law use a strict and counterintuitive interpretation
of the law, however, and most legal observers think this is unlikely to
happen. Nonetheless, Russ Smith
says he has settled with junk emailers out of court under this
law and been paid real money.
I have seen
proponents of junk email try many times to use the free-speech argument
to attempt to defend their abusive practices. This reasoning, to put it
bluntly, is total crap.
Other people's
free-speech rights end where your property begins. Yes, everyone has a
right to freely express their opinion, but that doesn't mean that people
are free to picket in your living room. Nor can they legally make you
print advertisements for them with your fax machine (see above). Just
because you don't let marketers put up billboards in your bedroom doesn't
mean you're advocating censorship! You pay for your computer hardware,
your software, and your Internet email service, and it belongs to you.
You have a right to control what occurs on your own equipment.
Commercial
advertising is also afforded less protection by the Supreme Court than
other forms of speech. The courts have repeatedly upheld restrictions
on advertising (for example, saying where ads can and can't be placed via
zoning laws) that it doesn't apply to personal or political speech.
Junk emailers
are trying to get you to confuse your right to say what you want in public
and on your own property with the issue of what they
can say on your property. Claiming that people who don't
want to be forced to pay for other people's advertising are advocating
censorship is completely bogus, and, frankly, insulting to people who
are genuinely concerned about real censorship issues.
The
Bogus Senate Bill "Legalizing" Junk Email
Sometimes you will encounter text at the bottom of an email message that claims the mail is not spam because it conforms to a Federal bill. It may look something like this:
**************************** NOTICE *****************************
This email can not be considered spam as long as we include: Contact
information
& remove instructions. If you have somehow gotten on this list in
error, or for
any other reason would like to be removed, please reply with "remove"
in the
subject line of your message. This message is being sent to you in compliance
with the current Federal legislation for commercial e-mail (H.R.4176
- SECTION
101 Paragraph (e)(1)(A)) AND Bill s.1618 TITLE III passed by the 105th
U.S. Congress
This notice
isn't worth a load of steaming dingo kidneys. As
of this writing, there is no Federal commercial email law. Anyone
who ever watched Schoolhouse
Rock knows that bills are not laws, and have no legal force.
Often (as in this case) the bills cited in these spam disclaimers
are not even active, having died in committee without ever being voted on by Congress, let alone "passed."
Know
your enemy.
Many senders
of junk email appear to have gathered email addresses from Usenet News postings.
There are several services available on the Net that will filter news by
keywords (DejaNews Research Service,
NewsWeeder(tm),
or the Stanford Information Filtering
Tool (SIFT), for example) and thus send you a list of articles on a
certain topic (at least, if you pick good keywords). Using these sorts of
services, in conjunction with an automated script to parse out email addresses,
allows the junk-mailer to construct a list of future victims. Note that
the junk-mailer does not have the courtesy to even read these postings,
let alone actually participate in the newsgroups.
A couple of
junk messages I have received have indicated that, unbeknownst to me,
I have been signed up on some kind of automatic junk mailing list. It
indicated an 800 number that I could call to get put on a "do-not-junk-mail"
list, but why should I have to do this?
There
are literally thousands of legitimate
automated mailing lists available on the Net, usually running on LISTSERV
or Majordomo software. To subscribe to the mailing list, a user must send
a request message with a particular keyword in the body to the command
processor email address. Subscribers can later send an "unsubscribe" message
to the command processor to remove themselves from the list. Note that
the subscriber has to take a specific action to subscribe to the list,
an "opt-in" system.
In
the case of junk email I received from ixc.ixc.net, the user has been
subscribed against their will, and the only way to unsubscribe is to call
an 800 number! (Which, incidentally, makes your phone number appear on their
service bill--even if you dial the *67 to disable Caller ID.) You can
imagine what the state of the net would be if this "opt-out" system became
the norm for all the more than 54,000
of automatic mailing lists. Users would be doing nothing all day but downloading
unwanted messages and trying to get off of mailing lists.
Therefore,
I consider this rogue behavior on the Internet, to be dealt
with accordingly.
Some junk
email you receive will be of the chain letter persuasion. Chain letters
are a waste of bandwidth and of many people's valuable time. Just because
it is easy to send a chain letter on to several people, doesn't mean it
is a good idea. You should not forward chain email, no
matter how dire the threatened supernatural consequences.
Some chain
letters also involve sending money through the snail mail. You add your
name to the bottom of a list, send a few bucks to the people at the top
of the list, and soon, the letters invariably promise, vast riches will
be winging your way in little envelopes. The only problem is, of course,
that the people at the top of the list are really only a couple of people
with a lot of addresses, and all sucker money goes to them. This is known
as a Ponzi Scheme or Pyramid Scam. If
it asks you to send any money through the mail, it is also completely
illegal, specifically, it violates the Postal
Lottery Statute, which is Title 18, United
States Code, Section 1302.
Don't believe
the bogus argument of email that claims this particular scheme is legal
because you are really paying for a "legitimate service" or product (usually
claimed to be the service of compiling the list itself). If it involves
putting you name on a list and sending cash to other names on the list
(in other words, paying earlier players with money from later players),
it's a pyramid scheme, and it's illegal.
According
to US
Postal Service information about chain letters (pointed out to me
by Mark Horne), you can report such
schemes by sending a hard copy of the offending document to:
Postal Inspector
c/o Postmaster
Your Town, Your State Your Zip
You don't even need to use a stamp!
(No stamp required for official postal business.)
Your local
Postmaster forward it to the Postal Inspector at the appropriate regional
office (there's something like a dozen regions). They'll investigate,
send warning letters, or take legal action as appropriate, and send you
a letter explaining what transpired (it may take a long time, however).
I want to
say up front that I don't believe in the "do-not-call list" model of preventing
junk email. This is an approach proposed by a few Internet advertisers
that is modeled on the Telemarketing Association's list of people who
don't want phone solicitations. In a nutshell, you submit your email address
to them, and they put you in a database that they claim they are going
to sell to mass emailers so that they can take you off their mass-email
list.
I have two
fundamental problems with this approach. First of all, it legitimizes
the idea of mass-emailing (junk emailing) by essentially saying that it
can be made acceptable by offering an (unreliable and unproven) way for
victims to opt out. Secondly, it offers junk emailers an excuse to keep
junk-mailing people who don't know how to get on these lists.
One
of these sites wants you to submit your email address to a page that
is really unprofessional-looking and poorly constructed, and it has an
inexperienced Net-newbie feel to it, which doesn't inspire confidence.
Frankly, I find it a little hard to trust the competence and ethics of
a database holder who can't even spell the word "etiquette."
Note also
that mass-emailers have no incentive to remove any names from their lists.
Their advertisements brag about the size of their lists, i.e., "We'll
send your advertizement to OVER 1,000,000 email addresses!" Obviously,
it is in their interest to have as may addresses as possible, and not
to remove any.
The reason
that this approach sort of works in the Real World is because there is
a specific federal
law in the United States that mandates this database list be honored.
There is currently no such legislation applying to unsolicited email,
so there is no reason for junk emailers to honor any such list. As noted
earlier, the phone model is based on a system where the caller pays for
the call--this is not true in email, where the recipient foots the bill.
Also, I don't think the system is a model to be emulated anyway, because
it to doesn't work very well to stop phone solicitations. It was really
just an example of Congress caving in to the telemarketing industry--it
puts all the burden on the victim to keep the list updated, and requires
reregistering every couple of years.
Big connection
providers (like Sprint, for examples) often are not ISPs,
instead, ISPs are their customers. Generally, if you
complain to them, you will get a canned response to the effect that they
don't police their customer ISPs' individual users, and recommend contacting
the ISP. In a way, they have a point--complaining to them about a single
junk email is like calling the phone company when you get a crank phone
call. On the other hand, if there is a pattern of abuse (you get lots
of crank calls from the same number) or if the scale is large enough (lots
of people getting crank calls) the phone company does eventually step
in. If they get enough complaints, or if the ISP demonstrates a repeated
pattern of abuse, or someone with a lot of suck complains (for example,
AOL), the big pipe providers will take action.
If you and
others have tried everything else and the junk email just keeps coming,
it is a rogue site, and your only hope is to get the upstream provider
to cut the site off from the rest of the net.
MCI has an
excellent AUP, which has been emulated throughout the industry.
The biggest
online service, with well over 6 million members, is, of course, America
Online (AOL). If the junk email is from America Online, the complaint
address is abuse@aol.com. AOL is surprisingly
responsive, and boots offenders pretty quickly. But as long as they keep
letting people have immediate, unverified access to the Internet with
their ubiquitous
diskettes, junk mail will never stop emanating from there.
Netcom has
a similar problem. I get more junk email from Netcom "throwaway" accounts
than any other single source. Netcom has also gotten serious about dealing
with junk email, I'm happy to report.
Allies
I am happy
to report that I am not the only person annoyed by this behavior. Here
are some other people on the net who also think junk email is wrong.
The
Enemy
- Bulk
Email "Some people do frown upon this method, but they are a minority"--yeah,
right.
- Check out
the Direct Marketing Association and Interactive
Services Association's Principles
for Unsolicited Marketing E-mail as well as their Guidelines
on Online Solicitation. But what do you expect--these are the people
who think unsolicited sales phone calls are a Good Idea, and who fought
the junk fax law.
- CV
Communications Bulk E-Mail Reseller; check out their false marketing
claims "everyone reads their email" and offers to insulate their advertisers
by filtering out negative responses--shouldn't that be a clue to their
customers that junk email is a Bad Idea?
- Email
Enterprises offers complete junk email "solutions," including address
slurping software
- Newmarkets,
Incorporated supports "Direct
Emailing" (junk email)
- Southwind
Enterprises claims to be "one of the first advertising firms to
enter in the Bulk E-mail
specialty"
- Vernon
Hale's Floodgate site Floodgate is bulk email address slurper
- SoftCell
has spammed me many times.
- What junk
email list could be complete without Sanford Wallace's CyberPromo?--Whoops,
SprintNet yanked his access! It may interest you to know that Sanford
Wallace used to be in the bulk junk fax business, until that was made
illegal. I have heard it alleged that Wallace was almost single-handedly
responsible for the original junk-fax
law.
- Dearborn,
Michigan-based AGIS, a large Internet
backbone provider, has continued to allow their customers (CyberPromo
and other junk email outfits) to pollute the network with massive amounts
of bulk unsolicited commercial email, and refuses to take any action
against them despite repeated complaints from the victims. Because AGIS
is a backbone provider, a peer of UUnet, ANS, etc., there simply isn't
anyone above them to complain to. They claim that they are going to
start requiring all their customers to consult and honor a master remove
list that AGIS will maintain--an "opt-out" system that is completely
unworkable.
The
Authorities
- The Fraud
Information Center. Their email address is fraudinfo@psinet.com.
You can also call toll-free at 1-800-876-7060 Fax Number is 202-835-0767
The snail-mail address is P O Box 65868, Washington, DC 20035.
- The Securities
and Exchange Commission (SEC) Division of Enforcement Complaint Center
has an excellent Complaint
Form. Their email address is enforcement@sec.gov
The Enforcement Internet Fraud Hotline is:(202) 942-4647; You can also
call toll-free at 1-800-SEC-0330; Fax Number is (202) 942-9618. The
snail-mail address is SEC Division of Enforcement, Mail Stop 4-3A, 450
Fifth Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20549.
- The Federal
Trade Commission STAFF CONTACT: Bureau of Consumer Protection, Ms.
Broder, 202-326-3224 (number may need to be updated), bbroder@ftc.gov
- Net
Check Sort of a Better Business Bureau of the Net.
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