Adam Kalsey

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

Security & Privacy

Re-educating a spammer

13 Oct 2006

Hopefully I’ve turned someone away from a life of spam. This afternoon someone posted a request to Sacramento craigslist looking for a spamming tool.

Email harvester?
Reply to: job-220213154@craigslist.org

I have seen several programs that harvest emails from the internet. I have also in the past known programmers that could write programs to retrive email from the net. I need a list of real estate agents, sortable by city, for the entire country. There are some lists out there but they are out of date or to expensive. Maybe someone has already compiled this list, or knows how to do it. Let me know if you can do it, cash paid.

Job location is Sacramento
Compensation: $600.00 Cash on complete job.

I’m guessing that he just doesn’t know what he’s asking for. He sounds a bit innocent in his request and possibly doesn’t equate what he’s doing with spam. So I tried a bit of education.

Why do you think that just because someone posts their email address on a web site that it’s okay to contact them?

There’s a word for what you’re looking for. It’s called spam. Billions of dollars are spent each year trying to fight it. People hate it. It’s unethical and immoral. And since you’re in California, it’s illegal to send.

Why’s spam so bad? It hogs resources that don’t belong to you. It wastes people’s time. It shifts the costs of doing your marketing from you to the recipient. It gets in the way of legitimate, useful email.

Imagine getting telemarketing calls in which the caller pretended to be your relative in trouble. And they called collect. Then when you took the call, you found out they were selling something instead. You’ve been interrupted at dinner, fooled into listening to a sales pitch, and then had to pay for the privilege.

Any business worth being in doesn’t need to resort to these tactics. Lowlife scumbags like porn peddlers, counterfeit watch dealers, and financial scammers promote their goods with spam. Do you really want to associate your business with them?

Please rethink what you’re intending.

Think it will work?

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