mmm… looks delicious
I haven’t figured out why this strategy is not invoked more: Attack pornographic spam on the basis that the senders are sending smut to children. A person can’t walk up to a 9-year-old stranger and start talking to him about increasing the size of certain parts of his anatomy, so why should he be able to do it via bulk e-mail? There are limits to what this approach to combatting spam can achieve, of course.
The government said four of the firms already agreed to pay nearly $1.2 million to settle the charges, making it among the most aggressive government crackdowns on pornographic e-mail operations.
The Federal Trade Commission described the practice as “electronic flashing” and said at least some of the unwanted e-mails were sent to children. The threat of children unwittingly receiving smut in their inboxes helped drive the U.S. government to impose restrictions on sending commercial e-mails last year.
Of course text and spoken word is a bit diffrent.
While I’m for this type of attack… I don’t agree with it…
Generally I am in favor of the Freedom of Speech. This, however, transcends speech and intrudes upon MY Freedom to Listen. Or view the trash coming into my mailbox. And I don’t feel I should have to list my email address with the Government to stop receiving trash either.
I have not asked any of these trash spam sites to send me their idea of a good time. I don’t want to see your wares. And I don’t want to spend my time wading through my trash bin trying to figure out if any good messages were inadvertently filtered out.
If and when porn sites all migrate to .XXX then filters will be able to stop the trash from our computers. Until then, I don’t want to view the trash. And I don’t want my 6 yr old daughter to either.
I guess it really comes down to the phone. If you have to list your phone number on don’t call lists why would email be any diffrent?
Although (and don’t quote me) I doubt someone could call someone up and ask them if they would like to sign up for their porn site.
Well, Anthony, I was once actually approached by a cable TV salesman who asked me if I wanted to sign up to their porn TV channels…. 🙂
Was a funny story, actually, he started out talking kind of loud, in my building’s stairs, if I didn’t want to subscribe the sports and movies channels, and other ‘thematic’ crap… Then, when noticing I was alone at home, he lowered his voice and asked me ‘and what about SexyHot channel, Playboy… no?’ 🙂 LOLOLOL!!!
It *may* happen 🙂
My solution to spam is to have dozens of different email addresses. One I give only to very close friends. Other for colleagues and such. One for work stuff, another to subscribe to web stuff – that one’s gonna be spammed, another on my website, spelt out like myname at myisp dot pt… Every now and then I drop one of the dumpster accounts (they last two or three years or so)…