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Spam Part VII - Horror Stories!My spam definitions brought various responses. People who don't do business via email had one opinion. Those that do had a different opinion. It isn't that all people who do business via email are spammers or even potential spammers. Some are. But often well meaning users try to fight spam only to cause innocent people a lot of wasted time and effort. In some cases innocent people lose their Internet accounts. This issue you'll hear a few spam horror stories. Two involve TheNakedPC.com and the other is one of my consulting clients. If you missed my earlier columns on Spam you can find them here: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/dan/ First I'll tell you about someone who wanted to unsubscribe from our newsletter. Rather than go through normal channels or write us for help he decided to just run us through an automated spam reporting tool. A kind person running a helpful website was threatened with termination of his website. Why? We mentioned his site in the newsletter. The spam reporting service found his URL and reported him for spamming too. The man was justifiably upset and we did what we could to assure his web hosting provider that he was not spamming. Here's the kicker - the spam tool sends complaints through anonymously. Without the persons email address we were unable to unsubscribe them. Another time a different person reported us to the same automated spam reporting site. After wasting the time of all the system administrators with the frivolous complaint we finally got through to a live tech support person at the spam reporting service. His response? This is the actual quote from the spam reporting services staff: "Thank you for writing us. As a charter subscriber to TheNakedPC Newsletter, I, personally, recognize it as completely legitimate and have enjoyed it immensely." He then went on to explain that if we would just change the way we handle subscribe/unsubscribes they would be "willing to take action against this user for an erroneous report." But since we don't do things "their way" they will continue to allow anonymous complaints to be filed and sent out against a newsletter they know is legitimate. Isn't that peachy! Last year a client of mine sent email to members of a professional organization. He belonged to this organization and sent the email only to the members who had paid to be in a directory. The directory was is list of contact information of people wanting information and commercial solicitations of interest to this industry. One of the people who received the email decided it was spam. My client clearly identified in his email where he obtained the contact information. The product he was promoting was exactly the type product the person wanted information on. And it wasn't the sort of thing you run across very often. Remember -the complainer had paid to be on a list to receive this sort of information. The bottom line? My client came close to having his web site shut down and his Internet connection cancelled. Every system administrator we talked to understood the situation. The complainers response when we finally reached him? "Oh, sorry". I added up the time cost of the people involved in tracking this down. The total? Conservatively several thousand dollars. And that is not counting the work that was set aside to deal with the false complaint. Had any of the accounts been shut down it would have been much worse. So am I saying don't report spam? Not at all! Just be careful when you do. Be especially careful about using an automated service to send out complaints. Just dropping spam into an automated reporting tool without understanding what is going to happen can cause more damage than it corrects. For tracing the origins of spam I recommend the services at SamSpade.org. Download the Windows version and read the help file. You'll learn all about how to track down spam. Better yet you'll have a tool set you can use in many different ways - not just on spam. Find Sam Spade here:
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