About mainsleazespam.com

About mainsleazespam.com

mainsleazespam.com is my personal contribution to publicly exposing the efforts of "mainstream" corporations and organizations to legitimize spam, or unsolicited bulk email (UBE). The goal of the site is to highlight examples of mainstream companies' spam, using sample spams, documentation by those who received the spam, online news stories, and postings to newsgroups and other online forums documenting the problem.

If this embarasses the companies or organizations that are spamming, well, all the better. Maybe they will rethink what they are doing, namely, contributing to the imminent demise of email as a viable communication medium, as a result of the onslaught of spam.

There are a several bottom lines regarding spam:

I. It is not about content, it is about consent. Did the recipient ask to receive the spam ahead of time? True, confirmed opt-in is the only acceptable bulk email model. Beware the term "double opt-in". This term was created a few years ago by the spammers to try and make "confirmed opt-in" sound onerous and unnecessary. The process is simple.
    1. I sign up to receive email, say at a web site I visit.
    2. That web site sends an email to the address I entered, asking that I reply confirm that it was in fact me who asked to be signed up (this to prevent forged subsctiptions, a growing form of abuse) and agreeing to receive future emails.
    3. I reply, confirming that I did indeed ask to subscribe, i.e. to "opt-in".

That's it. There is no 'double' anything. There is a simple confirmation step. That step prevents someone else from signing up my email address to lists, one of the most popular forms of harassment and abuse on the Internet, by the way. No one should be running any unconfirmed signups for email anymore, not if they are a legitimate operation.

II. UBE is not about freedom of speech, it is about trespass to chattel. Unless the recipient has given prior permission to receive the bulk email, it is trepass to chattel. This position has actually been repeatedly upheld in a number of lawsuits over the past several years, in which major ISPs such as CompuServe and AOL have successfully sued spammers bombarding their companies' customers. See page 8 of Compuserve Inc. v. Cyber Promotions Inc

III. UBE simply will not scale. One of the most frequently cited ways of trying to illustrate this is to ask what one would expect in their inbox if spam were Okay, and companies were free to spam without restraint as a normal part of their advertising. Let's look at some simple math. Given an estimated 22,000,000 businesses in the USA, if each decided to send only one spam run each only once per year, and I got a copy of each, my inbox, assuming the spam were averaged across the 365 days of the year, would fill with between 600 and 700 spams EVERY DAY. Thus rendering it, of course, absolutely useless. The math is simple. It will not scale. ISPs are now spending more and more resources just preventing their servers from collapsing from the load of defending against spam. And over the past several years, there have been frequent instances of mail servers of major magnitude at ISPs and universities being brought to their knees and taken out of services for hours or days because of the onslaught of spam email.