Spammers Frittered – by AOL!

It’s beginning to look as though the courts may be the best place to fight back on Spam – here’s mud in their eyes.

So what, exactly, is Spam? The official title for this execrable form of “communication” is Unsolicited Commercial E-mail – or UCE. More often than not, though, it takes the form of a decidedly dodgy invitation to journey to a porn site, or, alternatively, purchase Viagra, get your boobs enhanced or have your appendage lengthened.

You may also be offered what look like dodgy mortgages (available only to US residents, which only goes to show the brain power of the individuals that send it to us in the UK) or perhaps be offered a route into questionable pyramid selling schemes.

None of this, of course, is anything you really want to have finding its way into your mailbox.

Over the years, AOL has taken a dim view of Spamming and Spam – all too often Spammers have found ways of making it look as though the email they’ve sent you has originated from an AOL address. I suppose being one of the biggest (if not the biggest) ISPs in the world makes it that much bigger a target.

Of course, being the dimbulbs they are, Spammers don’t connect the “biggest” with having mucho clout when it comes to the hiring of legal types. And thus it is that AOL has hauled a Spamming organisation through the courts.

The full story is chronicled here so I won’t go into all the details, but it is a significant event for the world at large, as far as email is concerned, anyway.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it will be a shot across the bows of Spammers everywhere. Maybe they’ll think twice before they squirt gazillions of pointless emails out onto the Internet, and, more especially, into AOL mailboxes – that’s yours and mine, of course!

Or not

Or maybe not. The problem is, you see, that the Spammers can make substantial amounts of money from their nefarious activities. Even with terrible conversion rates – that’s the number of people responding to a Spam by actually making a purchase for every hundred (or thousand) Spams sent – the sheer numbers of emails they send can mean that lots of folks actually do part with their hard-earned cash.

Worse yet, some spammers have taken on board a pseudo-legitimate way of bombarding you with their unwanted dross. If you sign up to an emailed newsletter, for instance, the progenitors quite often decide to send you another missive, including in it a paragraph something along the lines of:

“Because you have signed up to one of our opt-in email services and are a registered user of our site, we thought you’d like to receive this fantastic offer”

To my mind, this kind of thing is just not on. Some e-commerce sites do similar things – if you’ve bought from them, they take that as an automatic right to send you an email as and when they see fit. And since you have to give a valid email address (because you often need to confirm a purchase with them) they know where to get to you.

Ok, they’ll say that it’s not really Spam, and that they’re only doing what Maplin and various other stores do when they take your address as you buy something. The thing is, I have not solicited email from them – therefore, their commercial emails are unsolicited – they’re Spam!

In the final analysis, I really do hope that AOL’s success in the courts will pay off in the long run. And this isn’t just a sycophantic, brown-nosing job, either. I’ve long hated Spam, and I’m more than happy to praise any organisation that takes positive steps to eradicate it. Well done AOL.

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David Dorn