[anti-abuse-wg] Abuse: Too big to fail

ox <andre at ox.co.za> wrote:

>Firstly, someone cannot just start sending you bulk emails each day
>without you ever having asked for those emails.
>
>Anyone can maybe send you one email and check if they have the correct
>email address and, if you do not reply or respond, maybe two or even
>three 'confirmation' emails..
>
>Twitter specifically, sends out the same confirmation emails, forever
>
>And;
>
>Twitter does not require opt in, to start sending you spam. Once they
>have your email address, the spam keeps on coming and coming. 


Yes.  Failure to do proper "confirmed opt in" is indeed a common and
widespread failing on the part of -many- big companies.

I would be willing to believe that Twitter is one such company.

I do not and never will condone such selfish, greedy, sloppy, and
anti-social practices, no matter what companies engage in them, and
regardless of the sizes of such companies.

However this problem is easily handled by those individual users who
are specifically the victims of such sloppy practices.  They can block
inbound email from the offending domain(s) themselves, in their own
mail programs.  (This is sometimes called "voting with your feet".)

As long as the companies involved do not begin to use so-called "snowshoe"
spamming tactics, it is easy for all those they offend with their sloppy
and anti-social practices to simply block their mails.

If enough millions of people do that, then eventually they will go out
of business and good riddance to them.

But blocking spams from specific and individual "point sources" like
this isn't something that is only in the hands of Spamcop or Spamhaus
or any other blacklist.  This is somdething that indivduals can and
should do for themselves.


covfefe