Page 3 - Hands up!

And how often does a remove work?
How many times does the email come back or there is a 404 or whatever. You are still on the spam list which no doubt was bought '2 million opt in email addresses'

I have opted in for nothing but still apparently have a man problem, need to chat to debbie, have been personally picked out by a nigerian royalty widow, get untold amounts of 'all I'm doing is letting people know the company exists' emnails (sorry, but that theglowcompany is not an excuse).

Imagione if just 1% of all companies sent out an email because they just wanted to let us know they were out there. Can you imagine what would happen??

The day spammers are made an example of the better. The freedom of speech crap doesnt wash. What about the right not to receive this crap? Who is going to pay for my time taken deleting the 'wanted to let you know we exist' spam that comes in my email box?
I cant afford to use a spam filter as I use an online form where keywords are requested for an offer.
These "This is a one time mailing... never again" emails you see are the worst. No opt-in at all and justified by the fact you are only getting spammed once. GRRRRRR. I'd like to ram their 'freedom of speech' right where the sun doesn't shine the amateur spamming *##.**s


Guess what my pet hate is folks? lol

<rant>
You too? I apparently have a "man problem" too! And my breasts are too small, my colon needs to be cleaned, and my septic system has trouble!

When organizing special events, I have sent out "unsolicited" emails on a few occasions with carefully chosen recipients. These were invitations sent to organizations that may have wanted to participate.

The difference with spam is that it is completely indiscriminate. I get email offering to enlarge parts of both the male and female anatomy, and to fix things I don't own. A band site I did as an inside joke for a few friends gets "personal" email to its leader - Claude Terry, the terrycloth lobster. Sometimes the email says that Claude Terry requested inclusion on that list. I wonder how that happened - Claude stays on the dashboard of my car (at least as far as I know - unless Claude is is slipping off to cybercafes at night).

Why bother creating a database of potential customers when you can just blanket the internet with your ads? It's more difficult and expensive to make a list of the people who would have a use for your product than it is to send email to hundreds of times more people who don't have a use for it. So spammers choose the cheap, lazy way out and send their ads for products (legitimate and fraudulant) to anything that has an @ in it.

Downside to spam for me: at work, it takes me a good 5-15 minutes on most mornings, 30 minutes on Monday mornings, to pick the 1 to 10 valid emails out of the 30-250 spam messages I received over the night/weekend. It's really exciting after vacation. Can you guess how many of those spam emails gets a reply or a phone call?

And while we're at it, here's my taxonomy of spam:

Hard spam: Junk mail.
Firm spam: Junk Facsimile (FAX) [particularly pernicious]
Soft spam: Junk email (also known as "spam" without the "soft" qualifier)
Wet spam: Junk phone calls (with real people)
Moist Spam: Junk phone calls (with automated callers)


Fruitcake: Forwarded (dozens of times) email from well-meaning friends and relatives who rarely have anything original to say, but who all seem to forward you the same little quiz about "what's your favorite color, etc." or same inspirational story.
</rant>

Jon,

That ISP is plain STUPID. Go to Prohosters.com. They know what link exchanges are. What you have been sending out was not spam. How else can you ask a person a question? It was a business proposal.

I agree with what you say Webby. But, If you were sent a mail that asked for a link exchange with a wedsite that was in your field, that perhaps, may aide you in some way or some information that might have some interest to you, would you mind so much??
I don't see this kind of thing, when I receive it, anywhere near as anoying as being asked for my bank details by the son of the now dead major Egumbu Oguele of Sierra Leone... or being asked to pay good money for some herbal help with my gherkin.......Spam is something I'm not too happy about. But when a guy gets blasted by his ISP because he sent out a small number of mails suggesting a link swap because one recipient complained seems a little unfair esspecially in a world seemingly filled with 10,000,000 + bulkers.......


Jon.

imo link exchange requests that are personalized and might be of interest is not spam. I'm on about the generic messages that get sent out by the thousand. I agree that your isp needs a reality pill and was out of order.

Oh b.t.w. the hosting Co. in question is IpowerWeb.com .... just in case anyone was thinking of going with them...... lol

Jon.

I am on a spam list for a computer that generates "personalized" emails asking for link exchanges, arrrggghhhh! Please read the site before sending a link exchange request!!!!! I don't want link exchanges that are not relevant to the site. A few more automated programs like this and the category is dead.

This is the problem: any well thought through will get turned into a spam campaign. This has happened with greeting cards (yes, spam masquerades as greeting cards). Link exchange request, questions about web sites, etc..

The backlash is as likely to hit a welling meaning person who goes through a well throught through and honest process to make contacts through emails. Back to the article on Utah lawsuits. The lawsuits filed so far have all been against businesses that are easy to identify, are for companies that have some money, etc..

The legal process will filter out and okay the real spammers, while landing big fines on regular businesses that haven't been careful enough to follow the spam legislation.

Well that does it. I need to reduce my debt, in order to decrease my stress level, so I can enjoy the results of those little blue pills when combined with all those beautiful affection starved Russian women.

And you folks think you have problems. I say cook the spam and serve it with green eggs.

Cheers,
theBear

the only spam that really gets me is the obvious virus. I get klez all the time...

I don't offer a newsletter for the very reason mentioned above...there's one in every crowd.

I get spam everyday...all day, I just delete all that sh$t on the server and it never sees my harddrive, or write a rule.

It's not so tough.

machiner

Try Qurb: www.qurb.com

to be honest i would consider the last mail i got from update@seochat.com spam because it had b*gger all to do with seo. it was about the poll "Which HTML Editor / Website Maker Do You Use". that is really poor and is of no interest to me. i subscribed to be updated about seo not anything else.

In my opinion this is perfectly relatde to SEO. What editor do you use when optimizing your pages??

If you'd rather not be involved in the community and contribute, the by all means you are free to cancel your subscription (which by the way is completely FREE).

OMG! what a misery !!....... Don't forget that Darrin hosts this forum free of charge for your's and everyone elses benefit! He cut down no trees to send you the mail and I doubt it took you half a second to delete it.

Some people! honestly!

I completely agree. If I had of sent something related to pornographic material, or lets say a form from a mortgage broker, then sure, even I would consider it spam?

But the fact here is that you subscribed to a website related to SEO & Webmaster issues . how far off topic do you think HTML editors are in a world of webmaters & SEO's???

What we have here is a classic example of someone who forgets what they subscribe to. This is only proving my point (which you took the time to quote).. The whole spam thing is getting completely rediculous.

I think one of 2 scenarios will develop from this in the long term:

1. Email will become so filtered that it will become almost useless, and even people we know will be auto-filtered out or will be accused of being a spammer. I know what you're thinking .. have a friend list right, and only those on the friend list can get through? But that's useless because then you'd be unable to ever do business or anything interesting on the web because nobody would be able to communicate with you.. Making E-mail useless.

2. People will stop bothering to filter spam at all, simply because almost anything you send these days is classed as spam. It reminds me of the boy who cried wolf.. if we continue to call everything spam, nobody will believe us when some true spam gets though.

darrin, i appreciate all the effort and hard work that is gone in to this site, I find it very useful and informative but I'm afraid I still disagree on the e-mail issue. shall we leave it at that?