Moving Forward with the War Against SPAM

I posted the following to CS-FSLUG and CMUG and I thought asisaid readers might be interested as well. Help me out in the war against SPAM by responding in the comments! Also, please consider posting a link to this on your blog — if the news spreads, maybe we can get more support for this project.

Hi everyone, I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but I've found a really troubling occurrence over the past year. Christians [are] using spam as a medium for advertising. And, I'm not talking about variations of the Nigerian scam.

For instance, I've been signed up for several “Christian” newsletters that appear to be genuine, and even one from a well known Christian publisher, without my consent. One sends me three copies of each issue of the newsletter.

I could just unsubscribe, but I think that — in the long run, anyway — fails to accomplish anything. These organizations are still using very disturbing means to get out their message. Thus I got an idea: a blacklist of Christian Spammers. I'll create a list of all of the organizations who seem to be doing this and place them on them on the web. The page will encourage Christians to avoid these organizations, or at least their e-mail services, until such time as they “repent” of this. I will then contact them and provide them with a simple way to be removed: delete any and all subscribers they have added through means other than legitimate opt-in sign ups.

Obviously, they could lie and fail to delete all of the subscribers, but there is a simple way to test this: I will contact them using an address other than one that they presently have. Thus, the only way they can remove me (and thus convince me that they have “done the right thing”) is to remove all unsolicited subscribers (well, there are other means, but at least I won't make it easy). [Likewise, if others provide me with reports, they can let me know if the company quits spamming them after I contact them.]

The reason I'm posting this is that I'm hoping to get some more reports of Christian spammers. Especially ones who repeatedly send spam out — the kind that perhaps spam you every week or every day (as some do to me). It is my hope that when they are publicly confronted about this, they will relent (my attempts at private correspondence have failed to get the desired results).

There are two reasons I see for doing this: (1) I just really despise spam. I get so much of it, my mailbox would be useless if not for client side spam filtering and SpamAssassin on the server. (2) I don't want non-Christians to be getting spammed by Christian organizations and thus start grouping Christians with the less tasteful groups that usually spam. I'm sure some mean well by this, but its wrong all the same, and I think it would be good to put a stop to it before it gets any worse.

So, what do you say? Would you send those spammers' organizational web sites, e-mail addresses, etc. my way?

-Tim

If you prefer to send reports by private e-mail to me, that is fine as well. I will not share your name with spammers either way.