An unprofessional approach to e-mail spam

A friend has had his e-mail address inadvertantly published on several websites. As soon as he was aware of this he wrote and asked them to remove it. Several complied, whilst others did not respond or correct this. Subsequently he now receives nearly 1000 spam mail messages per day. Recently he has seached Google for his e-mail address again, and contacted each site listed. This time most of them responded and took action within days. There are just two sites left that are totally unresponsive, but now there is one that has flatly refused to make any change:

Further to your earlier request I have heard back from ****** ************. I am afraid that it is not our policy to change email addresses once they have been published online. We apologise for the inconvenience caused but as this article is now published it will remain as it was supplied. Perhaps it is worth investigating the market for anti-spam programmes? I am sorry that I cannot be of any further help in this matter.

Whaaaat? A national newspaper removed the e-mail address within 20 minutes of being contacted and asking for it to be removed; but for this lot it "is not their policy".

What recourse has he got to tip this in his favour? What action can he take, or what can he threaten to make this happen? To have convinced 150 sites to remove the e-mail address and then to get down to the last three and be told it is "not their policy" is taking the michael.

Any advice?

Once that your email address is out there on "spam email lists" there is nothing really you can do. What I would suggest is first of all getting a new email address and "masking you email" using some javascript or using forms. That way the email harvesting tools cannot find it as an email address.
You can also put filters on your current email, but you are always at risk of losing real emails.
Hope this helps

The real e-mail address is already masked using javascript on his own website and there is also a contact form for people to use too.

It is likely that the e-mail address will be changed, so we want to get rid of all traces of the old e-mail address from every web document out there. Over 400 pages on over 150 sites have already complied. There are just two unresponsive sites and the one that refuses to make changes left to go now.

No other comments?

Burn down the web site owners hut. You can also marry his women to complete the vengence .


But seriously, I wouldn't make a big deal of it, I probabily wouldn't have gone through all the hassle you described this man went thru.

Since he has gone through the trouble, and since a polite email doesn't work, maybe a lawyers email/letter will make him think twice...

Another suggestion for vengence and a solution:

step one: find out the website owner's business address and get a contact name.

step two: watch infomercials, listen to radio ads, join free sample websites

step three: Have random free samples sent to this person. Things like hair replacement meds, athletes foot powder, a pamphlet on dealing with incontinence, perhaps.

step four: wait awhile. Then, write the contact again, telling them that the mailings will continue until they make an exception to their policy and remove the email address from their publication.

Spamnet it totally awesome. I get about 500 spams a day, and it totally saved my life. Plus, it NEVER tags a message I want as spam.

Three months later, and six months after the majority of sites took action to remove the email address from their sites, and the amount of spam has already halved.

These two sites are still unresponsive. There is plenty of evidence elsewhere to suggest that the average life of a spammers mailing list is about 6 months.

Hoping to get action from the last two sites, and it is a good bet that the flood of spam will become a trickle. The ISP has installed a spam filter and it now catches about 95% of it too.

I never ASK for my email addy to be removed. I just tell them that I have reported them to the Federal Trade Commission for sending illegal unsolicited spam email and that I will hack and destroy their web site.

Heh! Some progress. One site responded about a month ago. They asked for an update as to what needed doing (even though it had been sent to them about 20 times in the last year). We then sent them an edited and updated version of the page, just about 10 minutes after they asked, and then resent it a few days later. About a week later they said they had received it, but 3 weeks later the website still has the old version online. Not a lot of progress then.

The other site had originally said they would do nothing. After repeated complaints to various people, we set up a job that repeatedly emailed their data protection people with a three line simple and polite request to immediately remove the offending material. The email was sent daily, and after three weeks they suddenly complied with it.

One site left then. No bets as to whether it will be completed before 2005 kicks in.

Thanks for the updates. Spammers blow.

The final site (that's the one that acknowledged receipt of the new information file about 6 weeks ago) has still failed to FTP that new HTML file to their website.

Spam levels have come down a little more in the last few weeks; but still a long way to go to fixing the problem. Anyone know what the Italian for "Get on with it. Like, right NOW!!" is?

This is beyond a joke.

Oh my! They updated the page today.

The old page needed the email address removing, a link to a site updated, numerous typos and spellings to fix, numerous grammar things to correct, meta description to add, document title to amend, and 22 HTML errors to fix including one that renders the lower half of the page in bold, underlined, font size 6 (in Mozilla) because a tag higher up the page was not closed and several others were not closed in the correct order.

We sent an amended page with ALL of the errors fixed, and the font size 6 stuff converted to heading tags. We also ripped out all the font tags and replaced them with a three line style-sheet in the <head> section of the document. It looks like someone has taken a look at the new page, and fixed about a quarter of the visible errors and NONE of the coding, meta, title, headings stuff at all. They have edited their old file in Frontpage, rather than just simply using FTP to get the new version of the file sent to the website.

So, they waited six months to do the job, and ended up spending loads of extra time screwing up their already screwed up file, rather than taking 10 seconds to just copy over the new file as the new version on the site.

After three and a half years of asking, and at least 1035 emails sent (didn't keep some of the duplicates sent), my friend has now had his email address removed from 505 pages spread across 152 websites all over the world.

The amount of Spam received has already decreased by about 50% in the last 6 months. It has decreased by 70% over the year. In another 6 months time we hope that the level of spam will be very close to ZERO.

I'm glad for you and your friend