Spam Free

Spam is not a freedom of speech issue - it’s a theft issue.

Some people try to compare postal junk mail to UCE. Postal mail is paid for by advertisers and helps support the U.S. Post Office. It is illegal to place postal mail in a mailbox without postage. Spam is paid for in part by the unwilling recipient. In addition, it does not in any way help support the system, but instead seriously abuses it by overloading servers and causing the necessity of additional non-profit producing staff to deal with the problems caused. Ask the sysadmins of small ISPs who have to deal with spam-crashed servers how wonderful it is for small business.

Spammers cry about freedom of speech and point fingers at anti-spammers, whining that we are a small group of anti-commercial fanatics who wish to impose censorship on the poor small businessman just trying to make a living. What they don’t seem to understand is that their right to swing their fists ends before our noses begin. Every American has the right to speak up and express his own views without interference from the government (which is literally what freedom of speech is all about - the right to speak out against the government without the threat of being shipped to Siberia). However, NOBODY has the right to barge into my living room to give a shpiel on a vacuum cleaner without my invitation. One may also be prohibited from making a speech about fertilizer in a business meeting scheduled to discuss the company’s new personnel policy. And just try to yell Fire in a crowded movie theatre and see where your whining about freedom of speech gets you.

Phishing, pronounced just like the word ‘fishing’ is the act of sending an email to a user falsely claiming to be an established company in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft.

The email directs the user to visit a website that looks identical to the legitimate website, where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords, credit cards, social security and bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization already has. The website, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user’s information. Once this information is recorded, the ‘phisher’ then uses this information to steal or manipulate the unsuspecting users accounts, sometimes causing major long-time financial damages.

Email spoofing or ’spoofing’ is email sent from someone pretending to be someone else is known as spoofing. Spoofing may take place in a number of ways. Common to all of them is that the actual sender’s name and the origin of the message are concealed or masked from the recipient. Many, if not most, instances of email fraud use at least minimal spoofing, as most frauds are clearly criminal acts. Criminals typically try to avoid easy traceability.

By:Jer

However, the real issue is not one of content. Even if all commercial e-mail was truly targeted and all e-mail marketers sold legitimate products, we would still be inundated with countless numbers of unsolicited advertisements. Right now, most ISPs have strong policies prohibiting their customers from spamming, and when they receive the hundreds (or thousands) of abuse reports that result from each incidence, they will either warn the spammer or immediately cancel his account. Imagine what would be happening right now if this were not so and UCE was an acceptable form of internet marketing.