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You can warn off spammers in a reply
Disclaimer · Tracking · Notifying · Publishing · Certifying Receipt · Demanding Payment
You can warn off spammers in a reply
This page gives you a strongly-worded reply that you can copy and send to junk emailers (spammers).
The reply basically says that the spammer must pay you $10 for each further email message he sends to you. It's available free of charge to everyone. It doesn't cover telemarketing or junk mail; if you don't want those kinds of junk either, use JUNKBUSTERS DECLARE separately.
This technique uses ideas similar to those pioneered by Private Citizen Inc. Since 1988 they have been helping people to collect ``fees'' from telemarketers who call them after being told they must pay if they do so. Private Citizen reports that its members have collected more than a million dollars to date.
Although some of the details below (such as the price of certified mail) are specific to the US only, the general principles should be applicable in most countries.
This page is intended for individuals. A page on what organizations can do to stop spam is under construction.
Disclaimer and summary of the options described below
We are
not
lawyers,
so don't take anything on our site as legal advice.
We don't promise that what we describe
will get spammers to leave you alone.
It's up to you to get any advice you need to decide
whether you should try these options:
they come with no warranty.
Tracking down the spammer
In order to address your Notification and Offer to spammers it is necessary to find an email address or preferably a postal address. Some spammers include phone number, postal address or email address in the body of the email, but these should be treated with suspicion. Junk emailers often use ``spamouflage:'' fake addresses in the ``From,'' ``Sender,'' and ``Reply-to'' fields. A somewhat more reliable indicator of the organization that delivered the spam can be found in the the domain name (the partial address after the ``@'' sign) given in the ``Message-ID'' field (which your email readers may not display unless you request it). Some spam factories have their own domain names, in which case you can try sending your reply to them, but it is more often an ISP, in which case you should complain to them. You can type the domain name into Internic's whois form to get the details on the organization. Most ISPs work hard to stop spam, but lately a small number have become tolerant or supportive of spammers. Our Links page lists several web sites where you can learn more how to track down the people who send spam.
Option 1: Replying to each spam with a ``Notification and Offer''
If you do get a good return address,
you can send a reply consisting of
the following
Notification and Offer
and copyright notice.
At the end you can also add a list of
the names and email addresses
of other people who permit you to include them.
I do not want to receive uninvited solicitations by email (``Junk Email'').
I am unwilling to receive Junk Email
freely because it costs me time and money.
If you send me any Junk Email other than on the terms of the offer set out
in the following nine points,
I will take this to mean that you plan to use
what I offered you without paying for it.
If you ever try to do this I reserve my right to take any action available to
me without further reference to you.
Actions available to me include
taking proceedings against you for negligence or breach of contract,
which may result in substantial damages being awarded against you by a court.
The unauthorized use of my computing facilities
may even be a crime.
The copyright of the above text is held by Junkbusters Corporation
and is used here in accordance with the GNU General Public License,
copies of which are available at www.junkbusters.com or from the Free
Software Foundation, Inc.,
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
Everyone has our permission under the
GNU GPL
to copy this and distribute it.
What you do with it is your responsibility of course,
and we don't guarantee it will silence the spammer.
The Notification and Offer uses the common idea that you may have to pay if you do something that costs someone else money. Whenever you refuel your car or call a 900 number you are told how much you will have to pay, and you don't have to accept what is offered to you. Starting to fill your tank indicates your acceptance of the offer, which obliges you to pay, even though you didn't sign a contract saying you would. The Notification and Offer above tells the spammer that receiving junk email costs you money, and that you require certain payments if he sends you any.
Don't plan on getting rich from spammers: most of them have shallow pockets. And please don't send huge numbers of these replies or include an enormous list of email addresses: this can make everybody suffer. Certified mail has two advantages over email: it doesn't slow the Internet, and it gives you a way of proving that the spammer received your offer.
We don't recommend sending an email copy of the Notification and Offer to the webmaster of the ISP given in the spammer's email address. Those administrators get huge numbers of these reports (and many follow them up and cut off the senders' accounts), so please keep any reports you send them brief: just the full email header information and the first few lines of the solicitation are usually all they need. Some people ask for the account to be terminated and include the sender on the carbon copy list. Many ISPs maintain an account called abuse for such reports, though some ask for such mail to be sent to support, postmaster, or other names.
The Notification and Offer doesn't apply to responsible ISPs who have policies prohibiting junk emailing, because under point 2 they are not associated with the sender ``for the purpose of sending junk email.'' It's only in the rare case of a spam factory that this applies.
Option 2: Publishing your ``Spam Offer'' on the Web
We experimented with the following idea but have not found people adopting it, but we leave it here for anyone interested in developing it. Others skip down to the next section.
Any group of friends could agree among themselves to team up against spam. They could include each others' names and email addresses in every Notification and Offer that they send to spammers. They could even arrange to divide the cost of suing a spammer and to share any money a court awards them.
This idea of
teamwork can be scaled up.
People with web space can let all spammers know who they should not spam,
by posting their addresses in notices on the Web.
With the right permissions and software,
anyone can gather these addresses together.
You can help make this work by using
your web space to publish
the following
Notice of Permission,
which tells everyone that they can include
your email address
whenever they reply to spammers
with the same
Notification and Offer.
I permit anyone who receives an
uninvited solicitation by email (``You'')
to include my name and my email address(es)
given below
in Your reply
to the sender or the sender's agent,
on the following four conditions.
I permit my name and my email
address(es) below
to be included
in lists published on the Web
of people who have adopted the same
Notification and Offer
and
Notice of Permission.
Option 3: Replying by certified mail
Suppose the spammer sends you more spam after you reply by email with your Notification and Offer. You could ask him to pay, but he might not respond, or if pressed he might claim that your offer never arrived (email is so unreliable). The usual way that lawyers prove a message arrived is to send it by certified mail.
The US Post Office charges an extra fee (about $2) to certify receipt of a letter, but a single reply can contain a large number of email addresses. As well as your own email address(es), you can also include those of friends who ask you, and those of people who publish Spam Offers on the Web. A long list might result in bigger damages being awarded against the spammer. On the other hand, it would probably be easier to convince a judge to award you $30 for three items of email sent to you than ten million dollars to each of a million people. The choice of whether to include others is up to you. It is probably worth including a copy of one of their email solicitations that you have already received.
To send certified mail, get PS Form 3800, Receipt for certified mail, from the counter at any Post Office. You tear off the green and white stub, stick it to the front of your reply, and mail it as usual. You keep the other part, which is your numbered receipt. You don't have to lodge the letter at a Post Office, but if you do, the clerk will postmark the receipt, which might come in handy. The office that delivers the article will keep a record for you for two years, and you can ask for this by presenting your receipt at any office. If you really want to know as soon as your article is delivered, you can pay an additional $1.35 for a return receipt. You can also pay more for ``Restricted Delivery'' to a particular person, requiring a signature by him or his agent. Registered mail is a more expensive service, but we have had reports that it has advantages, so we are investigating it.
Postal services around the world have similar options, but they sometimes go under different names. In the UK the service is called ``Recorded.''
Option 4: Keeping copies of the spam you get, to claim payment
If you think you ever might want to help nail a spammer, you may want to start saving the spam you receive. Even if you don't want to demand payment yourself, you could share your collection with any friend who included your email address in her Spam Offer, so that she can ask the spammer for money for spam he sent you.
We do not recommend emailing people you don't know with news of your spam collection. This may annoy them as much as spam itself. To help our clients coordinate demands for payment, we may propose a way to automate the sharing of such information on Usenet, if a way of doing this can be found that doesn't overload it. Suggestions are welcome.
We don't want to encourage litigation, but everyone (especially spammers) should know that it is not necessarily a long or horribly expensive process.
The cost of filing suit in your county's small claims court is most likely between $20 and $120. The Clerk should be able to tell you and give you the form to fill in. These judges are probably more accustomed to making decisions about whether a dry-cleaner ruined a leather jacket rather than anything to do with the Internet, but small claims cases are generally decided far more swiftly than criminal trials, where the stricter criterion of ``beyond reasonable doubt'' applies.
We're interested in
feedback
on experiences with such actions.
Our clients might also want to share news
of their experiences with this technique.
They could post to
Usenet
or publish on their web pages their answers to questions such as these.
We need better law against spammers
We are not lawyers, so we can't say whether individual small claims or larger class action suits against spammers using these methods are likely to succeed.
Some people might send these paper notifications because they oppose spam on principle; others might just be hoping for a bigger payback. Spammers can't avoid receiving these lists by making it hard for any single person to send them. Even if our service were shut down, everyone could easily continue publishing and sending Spam Offers.
If you're interested in issues such as compliance, enforcement, and copyright, you might want to read the other pages on this site about JUNKBUSTERS DECLARE; many of the details are similar or comparable. But we don't recommend making this kind of offer to telemarketers or junk mailers, because you already have other ways to force them to obey you. For example, if you fill out a ``prohibitory order'' against a sender of junk mail and they continue to send you their junk, they risk being prosecuted as criminals. And the Post Office won't charge you a penny to tell them this.
We believe strong specific laws is necessary to ban spam. For more detail see our Congressional testimony on this topic.
Copyright © 1996-2005 Guidescope Inc ®. Copying and distribution permitted under the GNU General Public License. 2005/01/15 http://www.junkbusters.com/spam.html