Outing Spammers

Even though I think the spam crisis is mostly over as a result of filters and other tools in the email ecosystem, I still get spammed every day by lots of people.  I figure it comes with the territory and just hit the delete key.

But Mark and Charlie decided to take things into their own hands when they got spammed last week.

Mark Pincus (who is blogging with a fury lately) outed Michael Bluckman (and called him a dickhead to boot) for taking his business card at a conference and putting his email address on a list without permission.  Michael deserves it and I hope he learned a lesson about email etiquette.

Charlie also had the experience of going to a conference and getting spammed as a result.  And he also outed the company, Trylon Communications, that spammed him.

As Charlie says at the end of his post, "don't spam a blogger."

Comments

[Solar Energy Blog]

It's often time consuming but very satisfying to give a spammer their just deserts.

I was getting regular pornographic comment spam. I got fed up so I spent the 10 minutes it took to figure out they were an affiliate, which site they were sending traffic to and who actually owned the site and guessed their email address (pornographic sites don't exactly make it easy to find out who owns them). I didn't expect a reply.

A few weeks later I got an email from the company telling me they has kicked the comment spammer out of their affiliate scheme.

Maybe some of those in the adult industry hate comment spam as much as the rest of us.

Or maybe they are worried about going to jail:

http://www.whois.sc/news/2004-02/john-zuccarini.html

James
Alternative Energy Blog

p.s.

kudos to gmail for making it easy to report email spam with the "report spam" button