“Do Not Intrude” is Oxy Moron
The US Government has a list that it maintains called as the “do not call” list. The list exists as the telephones are one’s private property and a customer pays for it monthly. And this list is aimed at telemarketers.
On the same lines, blue security(I know that the link doesn’t work) has created a similar list that has a list of email addresses which are not to be spammed. This list is called “Do Not Intrude Registry”. It is a list that an email address owner submits his email address voluntarily to this company. The company believes that email users have the right to receive the mail they intend. In other words, if I don’t want any emails other than X, Y and Z, I could demand that nobody sends me emails other than X, Y and Z. Blue Security thinks that choosing not to receive spam should be respected by all email senders.
This “Do Not Intrude” list is oxy moronic. Let me give you the reasons. First of all, the emails that we create are mostly free (99%) and each one of us have at least 5 email accounts. Since we are getting the email account free, I don’t think we have the right to say “do not spam me”. Let me move back a little bit. What is spam? Any unwanted mail is spam. How does a sender know if an email is unwanted or wanted by a person? If a spam mail featuring viagra hits the inbox, I am sure at least 1 out of 100 people click on it. So, how is this really spam. My point is that there is no real definition or real set of rules that differentiate your spam from the rest of your email. Spam is highly subjective. A spam to you might be gold to another person.
Secondly, spam exists because some “smart people” advertise their email addresses. It is like your phone number. Would you give your phone number on a public forum? I wouldn’t. Emails are the same way as well. Guard your emails all the time.
What are the spammers trying to achieve? They are trying to advertise some product by bulk mailing. Spammers need a lot of email addresses to start spamming. A bit obvious huh? So, what is such a “do not intrude” registry doing? It is collecting all these email addresses into one single list which would make any spammer happy as he doesn’t have to go around searching for email addresses. It is freely publicly(after some hacking) available in one single place. I think that the whole idea of such a registry has not been thought about thoroughly and it is making a mockery of itself.
This is fresh news folks. E-mail users who had registered for Blue Security’s “Do Not Intrude” list have instead been the target of a spam campaign and received extortion e-mail messages threatening to continue the campaigns unless the users remove their name from the Do Not Intrude registry, according to CEO Eran Reshef. The message claims that Blue Security is “not playing fair,” and that members can only avoid spam messages by removing their name from the Blue Security list. “You are receiving this email because you are a member of Blue Security,” the message reads, in part. “Due to the tactics used by Blue Security, you will end up receiving this message, or other nonsensical spams 20-40 times more than you would normally.”
There has been lot of spam attacks on the blue security’s list. There are reports that the list has been breached into the hands of spammers. The blue security website is currently down due to high spam attack.
I do not like spam email. I would like to keep all my spam at least out of my inbox but still I want to review as to what is needed and what isn’t. If you need to keep spam away, get an anti-spamming company to take care of your spam mail. This is easy in reality other than signing up for a list that makes no sense to any layman.
Technopedia has an anti-spam service which gives points to every email. Each email is analyzed for different sections in the header and also the body. There is a threshold score which is user set and if the score for any email that goes above this threshold goes into the spam box and not to your inbox. I receive around 50 emails a day and I may get around 2 spam mails in my inbox for a week. The accuracy is 99.9% to keep the spam out of your inbox. This only works for pop and imap mail. If you need information about it, contact me.
Other web mails like gmail, hotmail and others have a good system in place which checks each mail and keeps most of the spam out. I would encourage you to use one of the better email services than any unknown email service. Keep your spam out in a smart way and don’t fall prey to lists.
Related posts:
- Australian Held for Sending Billions of Spam Messages
- Spam Killer Toolbar
- Spam as Money Generator
- How Not to Look Spammy
- Don’t Brushoff Privacy!
Filed Under: Archive Categories
You are wrong. A do not spam list does not contain emails, it instead contains “hashes” of emails. Ie they put the email through an agorithm that converts it to “d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e”. A hash is a one way function, there is an theoretical infinte number of strings that have that same hash. A spammer uses the same “hashing algorithm” to convert his emails into hashes and then compares the hashes.
“If a spam mail featuring viagra hits the inbox, I am sure at least 1 out of 100 people click on it.”
Yeah ok… I would say that’s an optimistic (spam supporting) opinion. IF a spammer has ur e-mail u won’t receive just one viagra mail now and then… u will receive probably 10 – 100 of them… daily.
Talking about spamfilters… it’s ok but it doesn’t solve the problem itself. Actually it supports the problem because that means “Yes, we have accepted that it is only the responsibility of the user to do something against spam”. It’s like an AA gun attacking bombers, hoping that they shoot down all before they drop their load. But the enemy keep developing better bombers and all u do is trying to keep up with this development.
And who is to blame if bombers come through and drop their bombs? The gun?!
Shouldn’t be considered instead of only shooting these bombers, attacking the country they come from to solve the problem once and for all?
Instead of wasting more and more resources into an everlasting defending war u can’t win.
I agree with the list being a dumb idea.
What he heck were you smoking when you wrote this? Whatever it is, I would like some because you are purely delusional or on the payroll of some spamming scum. Your great solution is to use filters and ignore the spam thereby giving the spammers an income and just letting the spam problem get worse! How stupid is that?
And how dare you say we cant complain about it, using the same principle our house addresses are free, but if we get hundreds of letters in our mail box we cant complain about that? think about it, what if you got 100 letters by snailmail a day asking you to buy Viagra…
As for the Blue members database being cracked/hacked and distributed, check out this link:
http://www.ezee.se/blog/blog-2-BLUE_SECURITYS_BLUE_FROG_ILLEGALLY_SPAMMING_AND_DDOSING_INNOCENT_SITES.html
furthermore, using a service like Technopedia or an anti-spam service relies on machine knowledge which will never be 100% accurate and just ignores the spam instead of fighting back, which is what we have been doing for well over a decade, now the tides have turned.
Cheers!
I totally agree with Ryan.
What I don’t get is why spammers object to being told not to send email to people who hate spam and thus are pretty much guaranteed not to actually buy anything from bulk emails. When you have to “cold-call” people, there’s a certain portion of the population that just aren’t going to respond no matter what you do; I for one would be thankful for being given the opportunity to stop wasting time and resources on non-customers.
The author of this article clearly has no idea. The link Ryan posts above explains how it REALLY works. And stuff like “you don’t have the right not to receive spam” just makes me think this guy probably is a spammer himself. NO-ONE seriously believes that
@Raven, the reason that spammers dont want to listen when being told not to mail the blue registry is because sometimes they get paid by the thousand emails or 10k or 100k or million, they already have most of the addresses which are on the registry and if they dont mail them there, then they lose money and have to find other addresses to mail… its also an ego and control issue, they feel they have the “power” to send whatever they want into our inboxes and all we can do is delete it, you dont tell them what to do they tell YOU (i.e: accept the spam or delete it.
Check out the link I posted above, it should answer quite a few of your questions.
Cheers!
Ryan
Only a spammer would post such garbage about BlueSecurity.com. It is obvious that you blatantly choose to ignore how Blue Security actually works, which is posted in the FAQs on their web site at http://community.bluesecurity.com/faq/ (which is temporarily down due to a spammer attack, but which will be up and running again in a few days).
Spammers post garbage like this ‘article’ in order to create fear and spread misinformation about Blue Security because they FEAR Blue Security and its completely legal methods for requesting opt-outs.
– Blue Security ALWAYS notifies a spammer’s sponsor before any individual opt-outs are sent.
– If the spammer does not use Blue Security’s opt-out tools (to strip out e-mail addresses which have requested to be opted-out) within a reasonable period of time, then Blue Security’s servers send limited amounts of opt-out requests. Blue Security limits these requests in order to NOT bring down a sponsor web site, which would constitute a Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and is illegal in many countries. (Using a DDoS attack would make Blue Security no better than the spammers they work against).
– No more than one (1) opt-out request is sent for each spam email received. This is within the parameters of the CAN-SPAM Act.
– Blue Security then contacts any relevant government agencies, domain registrars, ISPs, and other businesses to inform them that their services are being used to assist these spammers and/or sponsors who refuse to clean their databases of e-mail addresses which have requested legitimate opt-outs under the CAN-SPAM Act.
Blue Frog, the program downloaded by Blue Security members, is an open source project. Anyone can view (or have someone knowledgeable in computer programming review) the code to be downloaded to verify that it is not and will not do anything harmful to your computer.
The member database of e-mail addresses requesting opt-outs is encrypted and cannot be decrypted by the spammers. For more detail, please visit Ryan’s article.
Just think about this: Wouldn’t it be more beneficial for these companies to sue Blue Security over their ‘illegal’ practices, if indeed they are as illegal as claimed? Well, of course it would be – IF they had any legal ground to stand on. The problem is that spammers cannot win a legal battle with Blue Security because Blue Security’s methods are 100% CAN-SPAM Act compliant (for members from the USA).
If you live in a country other than the USA, urge your government to pass legislation regarding your rights to opt-out of receiving unsolicited advertisements in your e-mail!! I’m sure Blue Security would be happy to begin working with any legislation established by other governments!
Don’t believe the propaganda surrounding Blue Security’s mission or methods. Blue Security wants to help YOU exercise YOUR RIGHT to opt-out from unsolicited e-mail advertising.
Visit http://www.bluesecurity.com to learn more!
Vive la frog!