War on Spam
Wow if I believed in modern day prophecy I might just call myself a prophet 
If you recall my post entitled spam rants about a month ago, you may remember that I mentioned the possibility of hearing from the spammer’s lawyers, well today I received a second legal notice from his lawyers regarding my complaints about the spammer.
I must admit today’s letter was worded a bit better, however it is plain that the legal firm has very little knowledge on the internet. They demanded, and I quote “that [I] contact the administrator of gmail that you used and retract the statements made and post an apology”. Their idea is that I can ask Gmail to recall the email that I sent to the spammer, even though he has already read my mail.
It really annoys me that a company can be allowed to bully a potential client like this. How much does it hurt the company to write a personal “Hey there buddy, I got your details off xyzwebsite.co.za and thought you may be interested in our product. If you are not interested, don’t hassle, you will not receive any further correspondence from us unless you specifically request it.”
Now that is a perfectly legitimate commercial mail. It tells me where they got my details from and does not automatically assume that I am interested in the product, they give me the option to sign up or ignore this once off mail. Instead I get this mail from a spammer, assuming that I am definitely interested in his product and only gives me a link to click to unsubscribe. Everyone knows that 90% of the unsubscribe links simply confirm the address as a “hot address”, in other words, a valid email address checked by a real person, and the spammer sends more mail to that address and possibly sells the list to other spammers. Now I am not saying that this particular spammer that I am talking about falls within that 90%, he may very well fall within the 10% who has a legitimate unsubscribe process, but I need to ask myself, do I really want to take that chance? I have a 1 to 9 ratio of success, so the odds really are not in my favour.
Therefore I decided to take the legal route, to challenge the spammer according to the South African Electronic Communications and Transmissions act. He simply responds that I am giving his business a bad name by doing this, and threatens to sue me if I lay criminal charges against him.
Well I guess we are going to see what happens, I am going to print off all his mails including the headers, and go and open a docket with the police tomorrow. That docket will then be escalated to the Commercial Crimes Unit and said spammer will receive a calling card from a detective whose job it is to evaluate the conduct of the business activities of the spammer, and hopefully he receives his rightful sentence.
As a South African I stand against spam, and I call everyone, South African or not, to stand with me. If you have any legal qualifications in this regard, I invite you to contact me by commenting on this post and I will send you my contact details. I would like to get some advice on where I stand with this issue.
I am JMR and this is My Little Corner on JMRPub.com
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November 5th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Hey JMR, I read the previous post about this whole spam incident. I agreed with you a 110% then & I agree with you 200% now. I think spamming sucks and whoever this spammer is I hope he gets what he deserves.
I think more people need to stand up and fight these guys cause I get thousands of spam mails a month, but as you know G-Mail saves us from most of them with there awesome spam filter.
Well Good Luck Buddy,
Let me know if I can help.