>I disagree. When a telemarketer calls you he pays for the phone call. You
don't pay for your online time on the telephone when you are answering an
incoming call. When you download your SPAM over an internet connection, you
pay for your online time. Unless you are connected to an IMAP server, and
unless you are using an IMAP-compatible email client such as PC-PINE, you
have to download the entire message. I have received SPAM messages
containing attachments consisting of picture ads. Some are more than
250KB long! This takes a very long time to download if you are doing your
email with a 4.7 MHZ XT and a 2400K modem. You can simply hang up on a
telemarketer. If you hang up while downloading SPAM, the message will
still remain on your email server. One way of getting rid of the SPAM
message is to connect to your POP3 server via Telnet. Delete the offending
message(s) and then re-connect via your email client.
Regards,
Sam Heywood
>
I never received a spam anywhere near 250 KB. That would take 19 minutes at
2400 bps, maybe a few seconds with a 2400K modem if there were such a thing. If
the first part looked like spam, I would not bother to decode the base64 part.
I would look for the (spam) cops!
I don't know what telemarketers pay for the phone calls or if it's a flat rate,
but it it's not ordinary long distance. One can answer the call, and if it's a
sales pitch or fund-raising pitch, put the phone down quietly so the caller
wastes maybe 15 seconds before hanging up. Or say "Hold on, I think somebody's
at the door and think it might be UPS", and don't come back.
You don't know to halt a spam download until you read at least the headers and
beginning of the message, and in most cases you don't see any of the message
until the whole thing is downloaded.
>For their spams to be effective, most of them eventually
ended in a a promotional website. At the extreme end,
probably you want to bring this site down as well, by
complaining to the hosting service. This will render the
initial spam useless. However, newer spams tends to end
at an US 1-800 phone number. Apparently there's nothing
you can do about this one, instead of passive boycott:
*Never* call these numbers!
It's a good chance that they harvest your phone's caller-
ID as well...
Among the spams, there were some that actually promoting
spamming itself:
>
There is/was a service that would send your ad to hundreds of thousands of email
addresses for a stated price. Advertiser lets somebody else do the dirty work.
Might there be some telephone company office that handles 1-800 numbers (also
888 & 877 now) that could take an abuse report?
Some spam messages give remove instructions using a website. Maybe temporarily
change one's own email address in the browser settings, and fill in phony
addresses in the remove form? That would give spammers a bunch of bad data.
>BTW, I heard that spammers also using postal mail in the US?
>Is this true?
I don't know if the sources of junk mail are the same as sources of spam, but
bulk-rate advertising mail has long been common practice in the USA. Nonprofit
organizations get a cheaper rate. U.S. Postal Service introduced a "presorted
standard" category in 1999.
