Going To The Source Of Spam
There has been a lot of news coverage of the recently signed law in the PRC that will supposedly penalize spammers $1,000 for each message they send. Enforcing that new penalty, which is supposed to take effect 1/1/04, against the scumbags who churn out the actual email will be difficult. What has more potential than hitting those spawns of Satan in the pocketbook is penalizing the vendors of the products they are advertising.

I have been noticing over the past several months dozens of spam messages each day trying to interest me in signing up for the Stamps.com service. I know that these spams were being sent by freelancers, but they do reflect badly on the Stamps.com management. This morning, I sent the press contact office at Stamps.com the following message.

Dear Stamps.com:

I am currently working on an article on ways to deal with spam. One is to prosecute and in other ways punish the advertisers who allow their products to be promoted via spam.

I receive well over two dozen spams each day pushing your service. I have been using your service for a few years, so I am already a customer. I do find it quite annoying to have to wade through dozens of spam solicitations every day.

As you may have heard, the governor of California just signed a law, effective 1/1/04, that will penalize spammers and the advertisers $1,000 per item.

For my article, I am interested in learning what, if anything, you are doing to police your affiliates from the abuse of spam. I would also be interested in knowing if you have a mechanism for recipients of spam advertising your service to forward those emails to a special email address for you to follow up on.

I am hoping to publish this article over the coming weekend. Your comments on these points would be greatly appreciated.

Kerry Kerstetter
Publisher
Kerstetter Letter
www.TaxGuru.net

A few hours later, I received the following reply from Stamps.com, expressing complete ignorance of the spam being sent on their behalf.

We received your complaint regarding an affiliate that may be using
unsolicited email addresses to send our offer. This would certainly
violate the rules of our affiliate program and I would be interested in
getting the original email that you received so that we can aggressively
pursue the responsible party. Thank you for taking the time to bring
this to our attention as we do not support the use of unsolicited bulk
mail.


Robert Bowman
Business Development
Stamps.com
3420 Ocean Park Blvd. Ste. 1040
Santa Monica, CA 90405
310-581-7206 office

To show Mr. Bowman exactly what I was talking about, I am now forwarding him each of the spams I receive advertising the services of his company. If others do the same thing, there is a better chance of Stamps.com exercising some of its clout to shut down those affiliates. Mr. Bowman's email address is: rbowman@Stamps.com

My next target will be NetFlix, which is advertised in at least a dozen spams a day.


- posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, MBA~CPA~ATP~ATA @ 9/24/2003 10:49:00 PM Send this post: