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In 2003, at the height of the debate over “Do not call”
legislation to stop relentless hounding by telemarketers, newspaper
columnist Dave Barry disclosed the phone number of the
American Teleservices Association. The
ATA was then fighting for the fundamental right of all Americans to
interrupt other Americans’ dinner to sell them vinyl siding; Barry
invited his readers to call the ATA to “tell them what you think.”
They did. By the thousands.
For days. The ATA eventually got a new phone number – which Barry
ferreted out and ran in another column, becoming my personal hero in
the process.
In a piece I wrote shortly
after, I suggested that what was needed to solve the problem of
obnoxious email advertising, or spam, was more people like Barry,
only nerdier. I dreamed of gigabytes of email speeding its way to
spammers, clogging their email boxes like cholesterol in an artery.
If anything, the problem has
gotten worse. I recently took a vacation that included eight
glorious days without email, my longest break from the Internet
since 1996. Just shy of 800 emails were waiting when I got home,
only a handful of which were not spam. As this is written I just
returned from a weekend fishing trip to find 212 emails, all but 13
of which are spam.
Help may be on the way. On
July 22 a company called Blue Security launched a service called the
“Do Not Intrude Registry,” which it calls the cure. That remains to
be seen; spammers are as resilient as rats and technological
defenses to date have only inspired new attacks, but this has
promise.
Users can go to Blue
Security’s website to sign up for the Registry without charge.
Software will be downloaded to the users’ computers to track spam
and send details to Blue Security, which will scan it for violations
of federal anti-spam laws.
Blue Security claims 65
companies generate 90 percent of all spam. These fine upstanding
organizations and others will be asked to honor the Registry. If
they agree, encrypted software from Blue Security will cleanse the
spammers’ hit lists of all email addresses listed in the Registry.
If they don’t, the fun
begins. Blue Security software hunts down the spammers’ websites
like the dogs they are and looks for any page that will accept text,
like order forms. Each input area will automatically be filled with
a polite request to respect the Registry. Each time a listed email
address receives a spam, the spammer’s website gets a hit, tit for
tat. The goal is to crash offenders’ websites with requests to
knock it the heck off.
It just might work. I know a
fellow involved with email advertising that he says is in compliance
with the federal CAN-SPAM Act, so is technically not spam. In any
event he sends 2 million to 5 million emails a day, which nets him
about 200 replies.
Let’s say that is an average
success rate and that a spammer that sends out 5 million emails a
day can expect about 200 orders. Suppose its website has the
capacity to handle 5,000 orders a day, just to be safe. And suppose
just one percent of its victims sign up for the “Do Not Intrude
Registry.” That would net our hypothetical spammer 50,000 order
forms filled with suggestions to get lost, more than enough to bring
the site crashing down with a nice satisfying ka-boom.
I’m not endorsing this, but
if someone wants to go to www.bluesecurity.com and click the icon
labeled “Sign Up Now,” who am I to judge? Spammers like to hide
behind free speech; maybe talking back isn’t such a bad idea.
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