Why is nobody suing Classmates.com for SPAM?
December 29, 2008 1:29 pm General Interest, Rants[digg-reddit-me]I put an email address on usenet which I created solely as a test, using a name that I’m pretty sure nobody on Earth has. Within four days, it was getting Classmates reunion notices, and emails saying that my friends were trying to contact me, and that all I had to do was sign up for an account to find out who, and about what.
Unsolicited commercial email, and fraud to boot. Pretty much the definition of SPAM, isn’t it? So why isn’t anyone going after them like they are for the other spammers? Aren’t there vast sums of money involved?
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:35 pm
I actually stupidly signed up for their “free” version. Then I kept trying to unsubcribe. But dammit, their emails keep showing up. Where can we report classmates.com for not honoring unsubscribe requests?
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:35 pm
In theory, the FTC. In practice I’ve never seen them act.
May 8th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I use the old gmail + trick to find these people out. Whenever I subscribe to a new website, I use my gmail address and append the first token with “+websiteName”.
For example, “Ryan+classmates@gmail.com”
Gmail is cool like that. Any mail to my address, with any arbitrary string after the + gets delivered to me.
This buys me two things:
1) I can easily filter to various tags or spam or trash anything in the “To:” field.
2) On top of easy filtering, I can tell who the bastard site was that gave away my address. When I start getting penis enlargement emails directed to “Ryan+foxnews@gmail.com”, I know who to blame.
July 6th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I use a slight variation on that theme. I wrote a script to scrape first names and last names out of a list of email addresses I found, then I use those and a simple generator to make a recoverable hash that I use to hide the fact that they’re tracing addresses.
I own an entire domain solely for the purpose of looking like a legitimate email service which was purchased by another real email service which is now defunct just to obscure the tracing addresses. Well worth ten dollars a year, IMO.
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