23/3/99

E-junk

    Sexy girls! Prepare for Y2K! Earn $100,000 a year! Bezeq phone book on CD!
    If you have e-mail, those words are maddeningly familiar to you. It's a scourge called spam -- or junk mail.
    "ARE YOU READY FOR  DISASTER????? Tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, snowstorms / EVEN THE Y2K PROBLEM ... Can DISRUPT POWER and FOOD supplies ... WE CAN HELP. Ready to eat meals available now. Ready to ship right to your door immediately."
    "The Sanarchist Cookbook -- Known as the world's most forbidden information source and outlawed in many nations this book was thought to be banished from the face of the Earth... Including massive amounts of information on building home made weapons like the potato shooter to making dollar bills that can be used continuously in coke machines this book can pull you out of any jam.  If you are interested in those great WWII bomb guides & handbooks this thing has them all!"
    They catch your attention with devious teasers like "This Dumb Little Ad can put $2-300 in your mailbox...EVERY DAY!"
    They trick you with misleading subject lines: "Re: your account info." Sounds important, right? Open the file, and -- "ADULTS ONLY! Looking for the hottest ADULT ACTION? Looking for the net's youngest women?..."
    They proclaim "This is NOT SPAM! You requested this information!" Well, you didn't, and it is spam.
    I've been getting spammed at the rate of one or two messages a day: pornography, investment and business opportunities, product sales. Some of the messages are enormous -- as large as 26K (a typical e-mail message is 1 to 2 K).
    Among the dozens of harrassers was an Israeli company, iiclub, and they were both aggressively persistent and hilariously inept.
    I finally decided to take action.
    What a mistake.
    I asked my e-mail provider, Netvision, what to do about it. They were very helpful, but very wrong. They said I should reply to the spammers, demanding they stop. That is what not to do. These messages invariably include advice on how to stop it, but if you follow their instructions, it has the opposite effect. Responding to spam confirms your address as active, and you'll only get more.
    Jay Bailey, the Post's computer guru, tried revenge by pummeling the spammers with 100 of their own messages. He got skunked: taken for a spammer himself, his account was automatically shut down.
    Providers claim "zero tolerance" and ask victims to inform them of such abuses, promising to take action. It doesn't help.
    It is impossible to find out how marketers from Louisiana to Hong Kong get to you. They often use dummy addresses, so you can't track them down. They are impenetrable. Unless...

...UNLESS THEY screw up. They don't. Almost never. But one Israeli company made a fatal mistake. And then another, and another, and another.
    I actually began looking forward to their spams, because it was such a joke.
    The first message I got from iiclub was an invitation to visit their web site. "Have a nice weekend," it added. That was followed by an unheard-of apology: "Due to technical failure you have been sent the same massage (sic) a few times (3-4 times) and for that we apologize." But even their failure failed: I only got the message once.
    Things only got wackier.
    Message #3: the subject line read: "A great deal." They forgot to mention what the deal was.
    #4: only the subject line changed: "A gret deal" -- they still failed to tell me anything, except to state the following: "---------- gg ll jj hh</FON."
    #5: "For Israelis only!" New subject line. Still no info. 
    #6: Finally, an actual offer: the entire Bezeq phone directory on CD, for only NIS 39. I later learned this was a mistake: it sells for NIS 59. Stupid, right? It gets stupider.
    #7-#12: Other frustrated victims of iiclub's spam replied with indignant messages demanding it be stopped; one threatened to sue. Incredibly, iiclub accidentally forwarded those replies to everyone on their list.
    #13-#15: They still haven't figured things out. The offer was repeated, but somehow, I received it as an error message -- three times.
    #16: Another error message, this one a doozy: "WARNING: The remainder of this message has not been transferred. The estimated size of this message is 1,623,837 bytes." No wonder the Net's been so slow lately.

LEA HAR-PAZ is the owner of iiclub (Israel Internet Club). She couldn't have been more apologetic. "This was a huge mistake. The guy who was responsible has been fired, but in my position, I have to accept the blame. I'm the responsible one.
    "Our company policy is, we only deal with people through e-mail if clients request it."
    I didn't ask to be harangued, I pointed out.
    What happened, Har-Paz explained, was that unknown to her, an employee was working from address lists of his own. He refused to divulge where he got them.
    She could only speculate how he got my address. "Probably you went into a news group, or something, to which you gave your e-mail address to receive information. As far as I understand, this was where he compiled his lists."
    The company operates through newspaper ads, offering software and shareware. "We are not in the business of spamming, absolutely not. This was a terrible mistake, our company has a good name. Oh, no, this is not our way, absolutely not!" 
    People have been calling to complain, she said, and she dealt with each caller personally. "I explained to everybody, maybe 100 people, and they all took it very well. This is not the right way to do business.
    "You can't imagine how sorry I am about all this."  

THE ULTIMATE spam I received was this: "I'm tired of the porn email in my email box ... I've spend seven hours or more a day for the last two months researching the topic of Spam on the Internet... In this time I have practiced everything I have learned in blocking this crap mail ... and in the last few weeks I have not yet received one piece of Spam..."
    I thought, hmm, someone heard of my campaign, and he's going to help me. That immediately led to another thought: Wait a minute! How did he hear?
    Reading on confirmed my suspicions.
    "To order my detailed report and provide your help in fighting spam send $15 to the address below and lets all, together, put a stop to spam once and for all."
    Egads, I was spammed by an anti-spam spammer!