Subject: SPAM attempt by IOIP for Cyberlearning

From: Paul Wayper <paulway@e...>
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 07:31:53 +1000

All:

Recently I received a mail from Scholarships@i... on a mailing
list I am a member of. It was not to do with anything concerned with
the list, but rather was a completely inappropriate, useless and
unasked-for advertisement for CyberLearning. IOIP displays extremely
poor marketting ability in spamming by using email groups not related
in any way to their market. Cyberlearning display extremely poor
management skills for choosing such an inept advertising means.

It should be noted that the most stupid and inflammatory thing IOIP
has done here is in this paragraph from their spam:

Please feel free to forward this information to interested teachers, 
educators and others in education. If you do not wish to receive any
further scholarship information from us, please reply with the
message, 
"remove” in the Subject line. Thank you.

Firstly, as this was sent to an email group, any replies would have
gone to the group rather than to the original poster. Secondly,
opt-out marketing, as this is, shows extremely poor business
knowledge and causes far more problems that it allegedly solves. 
Thirdly, as untrustworthy marketers are often known to use these
'remove' requests simply to collect working email addresses, use of
'remove' requests is a dangerous thing for the user to undertake.

IOIP: You are directly responsible for this post. You should
question the person responsible for targetting an email group
completely unrelated to the topic of your advertisement. They have
ruined whatever credibility your company might have had.

SERVINT.NET: You provide connectivity to IOIP. Their actions are
considered as spamming and they may violate your Acceptable Use
Policy, as well as having damaged your reputation. I suggest you
look into this and penalise them to the maximum extent possible.

NETAXS.COM: You provide connectivity to SERVINT.NET. Likewise, your
reputation has been tarnished by association. I suggest you keep
this in mind when looking at SERVINT.NET's actions in future.

CYBERLEARNING.COM: You are the product advertised in this post. You
have shown extremely bad business sense in choosing to use a company
that would use any form of email mass marketing to advertise your
services. That they have chosen to advertise by using a forum
completely unrelated to anything that might have to do with your
product only makes things worse. I suggest you cancel your contract
with IOIP and sue for damages to your reputation.

TYCHO.NET: You provide connectivity for CYBERLEARNING.COM. We
suggest you look into this matter for any breaches of your Acceptable
Use Policy.

This mail has also been BCC'd to the group in question.

The headers and beginning of this mail were:

From: <scholarships@i...>
Mailing-List: list [email-masked]; contact
[email-masked]
Delivered-To: mailing list [email-masked]
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 17:07:47
Reply-To: [email-masked]
Subject: MN: Scholarships for Computer/IT Training for
Teachers/Educators
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by
smv18.iname.net id RAA01869

Tuition-Free Computer and IT Training for Teachers/Educators

Dear Teacher/Educator,

To help the Nation's teachers and others in education to become
computer-literate and/or computer professionals, the non-profit 
National Education Foundation CyberLearning, with the support of 
Microsoft and others, is offering the first 5,000 applicants full
tuition
scholarships of $2,000 to take any or all of the 400+ Internet-based 
online personal computing and computer professional courses.

The high-quality, user-friendly courses are either self-study or 
instructor-led. They cover all levels and almost all topics,
including 
Computer Basics, Internet Basics, Web Design Basics, Networking 
Basics, Programming Basics, A+, Network+, MCSE, CNE, Microsoft
Office, MOUS, WordPerfect, Lotus, Operating Systems, Windows,
Windows 2000, Linux, Unix, Networking, WAN, LAN, Programming, 
Java, C++, Visual Basics, Internet, Web Design, Web Applications, 
Web Master, E-commerce, Databases, Oracle and Cisco.

To sign up, just visit www.cyberlearning.org, click on "Free IT
Training,"
complete the application and pay a registration fee of $75.
This $75 is your only cost, since the tuition is free for you.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
SigClean 1.5a prevents all errors in transcription, transmission, and
reception of eMail, destroys sig and email viruses, and stops flames.
Report all bugs to the author. SigClean is FreeWare. (c) 1998-9 PJW

---

From: "Kevan " <kevan@s...>
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 11:59:07 -0000

> list I am a member of. [...]

Well done that man. Was this typed around the output of some cunning 
boilerplate spam-complaint generator, out of interest?

Kevan

--
kevan@s...
http://www.stormloader.com/kevan
"Throw your homework onto the fire."

---

From: Paul Wayper <paulway@e...>
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 22:09:20 +1000

> boilerplate spam-complaint generator, out of interest?

Not really - it was typed out of a knowledge (from a long and
somewhat embittering membership of the SPAM-L list) of what to say,
how to find out those responsible, and wielding the LARTing hammer in
an appropriate fashion. I don't expect anything to come of it, but
it's at least caused some trouble for somebody.

If you have spam problems, ask me for solutions.

Paul

---

From: "Kevan " <kevan@s...>
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 12:25:58 -0000

> it's at least caused some trouble for somebody.

Jolly good. I just went for the "quickly replying, pretending to be 
really interested in a huge purchase, but wording it in a very 
obscure way" option, in the hope that somebody's time will be wasted 
writing back. From a free throwaway Webmail thing, naturellement.

Whatever happened to those Web pages that take an email address and 
sign it up with all the spam mailing lists it can think of, 
incidentally? I couldn't seem to find any when I was searching the 
Web this morning.

Kevan

--
kevan@s...
http://www.stormloader.com/kevan
"A desire to see this land all happy and nice."

---

From: Paul Wayper <paulway@e...>
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 22:27:50 +1000

>incidentally? I couldn't seem to find any when I was searching the 

Is your desire to nuke someone else's mailbox completely or to shield
your mailbox from ever being chosen by a spammer as their target?

Paul

---

From: "Kevan " <kevan@s...>
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 12:51:00 -0000

> your mailbox from ever being chosen by a spammer as their target?

To demonstrate how annoying spam is, really, rather than to nuke. 
Forcing the lovely Cyberlearning people to at least change the 
enquiry email address they give out on their Web page, if their 
current one falls victim to a few spam lists. A shade more subtle 
than the easy option of mailbombing, which inconveniences others 
along the way.

I've seen the Cyberlearning thing three times today; in my private 
email and on the Genomic mailing list, as well as here, and I'm being 
quite infuriated by it. And I've sat in office meetings where the 
boss has said "Hey, why don't we spam people?" - it usually takes an 
awful lot of bricks to beat sense into these people. None of our 
legal/logical arguments working, the other programmers and I were 
forced to write a script to send out junk mail - if just *one* person 
had responded dramatically, I could have nailed it to the boss's wall 
and hopefully killed that train of his thought for good.

Heigh ho.

Kevan

--
kevan@s...
http://www.stormloader.com/kevan
"Captain, I'm... very annoyed with Uhura."

---

From: Paul Wayper <paulway@e...>
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 23:00:59 +1000

>than the easy option of mailbombing, which inconveniences others 

I prefer to LART the upstreams. There's usually a clause in their
AUPs that suggests that spamming is bad. They're also responsible
for fielding all the bounce messages, the flames, the mailbombs and
the hacking attempts that go into a spam so clueless that it actually
advertised its own site using its own name. (Believe me, some of the
anti-detection stuff that I've seen in URLs makes you wonder what
deviant mind thought it up).

Besides, there's that vague feeling of being above their methods.

>email and on the Genomic mailing list, as well as here, and I'm
>being quite infuriated by it. And I've sat in office meetings where
>the 
>forced to write a script to send out junk mail - if just *one*
>person had responded dramatically, I could have nailed it to the
>boss's wall and hopefully killed that train of his thought for
>good.

Maybe. I prefer to just stand up and say that spamming is proven to
be more cost - in terms of the amount of negative press it can
generate - than any trivial benefit you might get out of it. Banner
ad clicks have gone down to 1 in ten million pages displayed, from
what I've heard. People are becoming even more inured to advertising
on the internet, to the stage that it's practically wallpaper.

Anyway, whatever. Have fun,

Paul, who's discovered GPF comics (www.gpf-comics.com) and is almost
all the way through the archive...