posted on November 16, 2000 01:02:37 PM new
And YET..abacaxi..I will bet my bottom auction dollar, that if the e-mail you recieved from this previous seller, had been telling you about the "long lost gotta have whachamacallit" you have been in search of for months, you would have went and bid on it. am I correct?
posted on November 16, 2000 01:38:46 PM new
It seems to me that there are variables when it comes to defining spam. Some "offenses" don't seem quite as offensive as others. Especially when it comes to sellers offering their own bidders deals. It really can depend on the approach used by the seller and how receptive the buyer happens to be.
It sure doesn't look like one "punishment" fits all and I'm still not so sure just how big this alleged spam catastrophe really is.
Are folks out there launching nuclear strikes over their real world mailboxes too? How much spam do we all receive at home everyday? Isn't the trash can where most of it ends up? I'm still having a hard time buying the "all out war at all costs" mentality. Just pretend like the delete key is the nuclear strike button.
posted on November 16, 2000 02:01:34 PM new
Thanks, DC, for your honest response.
Yes, I normally ask permission to both Email about matching finds or maker AND sending Pictures, as I hate personally hate receiving attachments....
I was happy to find my Emails to this customer in my "Closed Ebay files" on a zip disk...... . It helps to be a pack-rat... I tend to save all Sales and Purchases Emails.
We apparently had a nice conversation about those items, and I recommended some books for her to read, so she would not get burnt...But no, that one time, I did not ask permission to show her matching pieces, should they surface....My bad...
So yes, I can see how it can be misconstrued.
TTFN
******************** Gosh Shosh!
posted on November 16, 2000 02:27:40 PM new
There are different kinds of spam. I get some from the dedicated spammers who are intent on spamming and getting away with it, and I get some from well-intended sellers who don't realize that they are spamming. The former I move to my Spam folder without even opening them. I believe that some of them contain email bugs that tell the sender whether they have been opened or not, and if they have been opened, the spammer sends even more. At least, it seems to me that I get fewer of them if I don't even open the email... Some that aren't quite that hardcore get reported to their ISP and if they got my address from ebay, I report them to ebay as well.
The spamming ebay sellers either get ignored or sent a polite note stating that "yes, I did buy X but don't need any more" or "no, I'm not interested." Then I make a point to avoid all auctions from those spamming sellers. Or (depending on the situation), if I have done business with them in the past or have had other previous contact with them, I will occasionally say "no, I'm not interested in that one but let me know if you have one in pink (or whatever color it is that I want." (This latter response from me is uncommon.) Generally, spamming hurts the seller who does it, because it helps them lose the future business of many of the people they spammed.
I agree with Abacaxi that it's MY e-mailbox so I get to set the rules; and it's MY time (so little and precious) that's involved in managing/reading my email, so I get to set the rules. Using my e-mailbox and resources against my will is theft! (I paid for the computer, the phone line, modem, Internet service, programs to manage my e-mail, etc. They weren't free.)
Violetta
(Not known by this nickname anywhere but here.)
[ edited by violetta on Nov 16, 2000 02:40 PM ]
posted on November 16, 2000 03:53:59 PM newRM and violette: You are both correct, IMO, that there are different degrees of severity of spam.
There are the "honest, just wanted to help, only occasionally" kind, like Shoshanah's teaset. This is the smallest, most minor case of spam. I would not "nuke" someone over it, if it were honest and didn't persist; but I have also described why others would -- because many spammers take the same helpful, "look what I found," "here's what you are looking for" tones, that it is hard to distinguish when those words are being used in an honestly or deceptively.
The latter has grown to become perhaps 35-50% of the spam I've seen in the last six months. I think the reason such deception has gotten popular with spammers is because it does fool more people into at least looking.
It's not that I'm necessarily trying to excuse overreaction. A simple "please ask for someone's permission" response would do for an innocent spam, but who's to know what is what? You send something like that to a serious spammer, and you'll get more spam. It's disgusting, but true. Maybe that's still not an excuse, but where do you draw the line? I really believe spam is slowly eroding and destroying several aspects of email communication that much. Don't forget, some get more of it than others, too.
The other problem is that more innocent sorts of UCE are still UCE. They might not be bad on their own or in a small number, and if that were all the spam there was, I wouldn't care. However, if I had every seller I've bought from sent me monthly or weekly notes about the great new things they're posting that they think I might find interesting, I'd be getting an extra 4-10 spam per day, and if one of those 4-10 had a 40K image, the total volume would be anywhere from 10-75K a day, or a staggering 3.6 - 25M a year. I don't want to see that happen.
I'm not saying it would be that bad, but if spam, innocent or nasty or deceptive or whatever, were "legitimized" as opt-out, the amount of all of it would surely grow by many times, perhaps a magnitude or two, because people wouldn't hold back on the idea of spamming like they do now. That is another reason people fight against it so tooth and nail.
So some will battle against even less offensive forms of spam on the general principle that we should all have the choice of whether to receive such notices, and specifically who from.
The principle is simple: ask me first, secure my explicit permission before sending me any ads beyond the transaction I've just made. There needs to be, in my opinion, a point where this becomes recognized as standard, so that the respect will be built in to the process of marketing, and so that even innocent mistakes become uncommon.
Spam is defined as UCE, but a subset of UCE is UBE: Unsolicited Bulk Email. This is even more deceptive -- the pyramid schemes, other get-rich-quick fraud, or that kind of stuff -- and the sender usually co-opts other addresses and ISP names to send it.
Regardless of whether the spam is UBE or "just" UCE, however, it is all UCE. So I agree there are degrees of spam, but all are still unsolicited. I receive both non-UBE and UBE spam, but guess what, my mailbox receives about equal amounts of both. 100 spammers sending me single, "targeted" emails can become worse then 10 bulk spammers sending get-rich-quick schemes.
That's another reason it is sort of all or nothing, because the "volume" isn't the only component of the complaint. The acronym UCE doesn't even include "volume"; you have to specifically mention the UBE subset to imply bulk. The fact that all of it together has become so voluminous is just what makes more people more angry about it.
RM: per real world mailboxes... actually, yes, sort of. "Nuke" might not be the right word, but I've fought and succeeded at reducing the quantity of junk mail by 80% in the last two years. Same thing for my telephone, reducing the telemarketing by 95% in the same timeframe, by learning the main tricks of the trade -- how buying items at many stores gets me sold out to direct marketers. I found that many companies sell you out to direct marketers: stores, banks, credit agencies, colleges, pharmacies, and until the Supreme Court said no, many state DMVs. Then there is DoubleClick, and all the tracking of your clicks at various sites including job hunting, child rearing, health, financial, and so many other sites.
I am sick and tired of all that is done in the name of direct marketing, in the name of wasting so much paper on junk mail, making so many pushy telephone calls, jamming spam down our throats, tracking and profiling us.
If you read over my notes in this thread and others (I know, I write too much to do that ), you will find that I usually lump all of it -- junk mail, telemarketing, spam -- as parts of one big problem: direct marketing. (Check my .sig too. ) You'll find I drift between using the word "spam" and the phrase "direct marketing," as I consider spam to be "merely" the newest (albeit the worst) arm of a multi-tentacled monster (well, that is a new metaphor for me on this, but that has always been my jist).
I simply tossed junk mail for years, albeit bemoaning the waste of paper a bit. I didn't like, but knew how to deal with telemarketers firmly, swiftly, but with as much politeness as they would allow me to maintain. Yet both the junk mail and the junk calls increased. I got more and more tired of repetitively dealing with something I never wanted or used in the first place. The final straw was spam, but I didn't just ask where spam was coming from, but where all the direct marketing was coming from.
I didn't like what I found.
To me, they are all different forms of direct marketing, and the only honorable form of direct marketing is the rarely used opt-in method.
Yes, some people make honest mistakes, but many others don't. That is why some of us fight against the ever-rising tide of junk ads. It's getting out of hand.
----
What's being done in the name of direct marketing nowadays is crazy.
The above are all just my opinions, except where I cite facts as such.
Oh, I am not dc9a320 anywhere except AW. Any others are not me.
Is eBay is changing from a world bazaar into a bizarre world?
[ edited by dc9a320 on Nov 16, 2000 04:44 PM ]
[ edited by dc9a320 on Nov 17, 2000 09:06 AM ]
posted on November 16, 2000 04:19:24 PM newvioletta: You're right, some spam contains what are known as "bugs." Even the act of opening such spam will get you more spam, if you allow HTML email to display as HTML email instead of plain text.
posted on November 16, 2000 04:26:21 PM new
midnightdesigns -
"..I will bet my bottom auction dollar, that if the e-mail you recieved from this previous seller, had been telling you about the "long lost gotta have whachamacallit" you have been in search of for months, you would have went and bid on it. am I correct?"
You are wrong. I do not buy from spammers, regardless of what they are selling.
posted on November 16, 2000 04:46:11 PM newdc, you've raised a point I've been curious about for some time.
I use an older version of Eudora Mail simply because it displays only plain text and will not activate any Outlook-type viruses. (I've been sent Happy99, PrettyPark, and KAK twice, and none of them executes; they just show up as code on the bottom of the email.)
If I open one of these bugged emails in the plain-text program, am I correct that the bug will not phone home?
If so, I feel much safer.
edited for UBB
--------
not SilkMoth anywhere but here
[ edited by silkmoth on Nov 16, 2000 04:47 PM ]
posted on November 16, 2000 05:54:44 PM new
I also use an older Eudora email program that doesn't display HTML -- or at least I can't find that option in it. But HTML does appear differently from plain text, so I'm not sure. Anyway, it could be just my imagination, but it SEEMS like I get less spam if I don't even open the spam emails. Any idea? I bought Eudora Pro 3.0 and upgraded, once, to 3.05. I refuse to upgrade any further because of Eudora's propensity to track/spam their users.
Dc9a320, for what it's worth, I agree with you. I am glad that there are people like you who are really fighting this spam battle. I used to, but recently just don't have the time and energy to fight like I used to. (So I do sometimes just delete without reporting it.) I also don't answer the phone -- let my answering machine screen out the unsolicited callers. Though during this political campaign the callers were savvy enough to leave recorded messages. So a need may be developing for more sophisticated phone screening devices. I know some of the ways to reduce junk mail; and am working towards buying with cash only because I don't like giving a little piece of myself away everytime I write a check.
Violetta
(Not known by this nickname anywhere but here.)
posted on November 16, 2000 06:13:16 PM newmidnightdesigns: Nor would I, no matter what it is. I battle spam, advise others about it, how not to do it, what the honorable alternatives are, and how it's just part of the general problems of direct marketing; so I am certainly not about to reward anyone for doing it, no matter what they have that I might like.
The irony is that after a couple thousand spams over the five years I've been on the Internet, I have yet to see a UCE that is about something I would actually want -- under other circumstances, not even the few that tried "targeting" my interests.
posted on November 16, 2000 06:28:36 PM new
silkmoth -
They can't "phone home" unless their code gets executed, and plain-text mail readers do not support it.
posted on November 16, 2000 07:49:52 PM newsilkmoth and violetta: Given what you have described, you have no worries.
I'm still on Eudora 3.0.1, because it gave me everything I needed, and some other great stuff, without all the extra junk. I don't need or want HTML email, the bugs, the too easy execution of potentially virus-holding programs, white backgrounds, blinking, etc. Email is about the message (the text), not about "pretty" or annoying extras, at least not to me. HTML is meant for the Web, not email.
With Eudora 3, I love how all but the plain text gets spun off as separate files in the "attach" subdirectory, where I can sift for the images family or friends might send and delete all the HTML files and other stuff, like picking pearls from a garbage heap.
I don't think Eudora added HTML email support until version 4.0, or maybe a 3.5 if they had a 3.5 version.
Plain text should look like just that: plain text. No highlighting (except maybe links), no background images, no changing font colors or sizes within the body of the message, no inline images.
So, if all you're seeing is plain text, and the rest either ends up as a bunch of <html>From: Someone<br>To: You<br>Subject: something<p>Hello, how are< >you doing?</html> or outright "garbage" (binary) code characters at the bottom, or spun off as separate files, the spammers will be none the wiser whether you opened the plain text or not. Just don't click or follow any link listed within the message (because the URL will likely contain an identifying portion that they can match with who they sent the spam to).
Note: If you'd rather not see the code at the bottom of the email, but instead have those portions (including HTML) spun off as separate files that you can then delete (and maybe find any pictures family or friends send), and shrink what's left in the note, look for this in Eudora's menu:
Tools | Options
-then find-
Attachments
-then find-
[_] Put text attachments in body of message.
Uncheck that box. You'll have to remember to clean up the attachments directory from time to time, and make certain you never run any executable (program, .EXE) that you end up with (those can carry a virus), not even from friends or family, unless you're certain they sent it as opposed to a virus copying your address from their address book or inbox (this is especially a problem with Outlook (Express)).
I tend to save all Sales and Purchases Emails.
