Adventures of a Newbie/Victim of a Spammer
Do you use an auto-submitter for your website? Have you received requests for verifications? And received all kinds of offers as well from FFA pages? Have you answered some of these ads? You need to be very careful about answering the ads as some of them are collection points for spammers. They not only collect your email address, they also collect your IP address.
I have a problem that just started because I answered one of the ads that was sent to me. There is a spammer who is posing as me and sending out millions of emails. How did I find this out?
I started receiving Failure to Deliver messages from all over the world. It seems that this criminal has build a mirror page and is using my email address. What can be done to stop them? NOTHING. At least according to MSN, I reported the abuse immediately and was told that unfortunately there is nothing that they can do because it doesn?t actually originate from their server.
So,what?s does this new CAN-SPAM law actually do? It doesn?t address the issue of finding the spammer. From my point of view, all it does is setup the innocent to prosecuted by some overzealous prosecutor. What is the solution? Not what Bill Gates suggested,paying for receiving emails, all that would do is drive people off the net.
The reason people use the net is because of it?s no-cost basis. If you suddenly had to pay to receive email,how long do you think the net would be useful. Maybe,maybe a month before people discovered that it was just another expense that they can?t really afford. It would spell the end of the internet.
My question is: Why can?t one of these programming geniuses come up with a program that will track down and cutoff the spammers? It is too expensive? Is it not feasible? I would love to hear that answer. It seems that none of the ISP?s are willing to work together on this problem. Is it going to take more government involvement(God Forbid) to solve this problem.
I feel that anytime the governments get involved all they do is make it next to impossible to implement their new rules. Look what they have done to online businesses with the latest rule. All they have done is made it harder for the legitimate businesses to do business.
Is there a real solution to this problem? I?ve had to change my email address in order to avoid the possible charges of spamming. Needless to say, this has hurt my reputation as well as made me very angry that nothing can be done.
So the question remains,Is there a real solution to spammers?
Not right now, lets hope that the ISP?s will see the advantage in working together to solve this problem. And maybe one of those programming geniuses will come up with a program that will track down the criminals so that they can be sent to jail.
Copyright 2004 Stephen Currier
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