Re: One in ten users have bought products advertised in junk mail.

"Viper" <venomx@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:r4l0e.17727$I16.11641@trndny03...
> >
> > Companies spam now and they will continue to spam because its so
> > cheap to do it... and for some companies its all they can afford.
> >
> This is why there needs to be laws. Fine the company SELLING the product
> $10,000 per spam. The government can register odd domains and get the
emails
> out there and when they are spammed theres no questions about optin...
This
> would also stop "affiliate" spam.

Laws against the actual spammers (the ones who send the emails themselves)
won't work... the spammers just have to move their servers out of country.

If somebody tries to enact laws against the companies doing the spamming
themselves it would very difficult to maintain...

The biggest problems I could see:

1) Affiliates. Say you sign up as an affiliate of ABC Corp... and they give
you a URL to put on a banner ad on your website and also explicitly say in
their TOS that you cannot spam with their URL:
www.example.com?referralid=12345 and you go out and spam a million people.
Who would be responsible for any fines? You or ABC Corp? You are an agent
for ABC Corp as an affiliate... but you are violating their TOS.

2) Fake Affiliates. An abuse of the problem in #1: say you are ABC Corp and
you want to spam but know you could get into trouble if you do... so you set
up a shell company and become an affiliate of yourself. So you still send
out the URL www.example.com?referralid=ABC123 and your server just ignores
"referralid" in the querystring. If you get any flack back you can just say
"Hey, it wasn't us... it was an affiliate. We'll terminate his/her account
now!"
To you it wouldn't matter whether an affiliate really was involved or
not... you'll still make your sales. Heck, if the affiliate goes under or
is booted off you are even better off because you don't owe them any
affiliate fees then.

3) Taking out the competition or somebody you just don't like. Want to
financially ruin a rival? Just send out a few million spam emails with
their letterhead and logos in the email... then report them. The cost to
launch this kind of attack would be cheap and can be done so its almost
untraceable back to you... even if it doesn't drive them out of business
with hefty fines it could tie up alot of resources battling the whole thing
in courts and mounting legal fees.

4) Jurisdiction. And the big obvious problem would be jurisdiction... it
migiht stop local companies from doing it. But when was the last time you
saw a spam from Microsoft, General Motors, Amazon, etc? The companies that
do most of the spamming nowadays aren't in any countries that would join any
form of worldwide anti-spam convention.