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SPAM OVERBOARD!! Before I begin and for the record, I detest bulk spam! It’s a sad Internet day when a non-spamming professional businessperson gets shut down by a spammer! This is a story I don’t mind sharing because I’m well acquainted with the victim. It was me! Here’s what happened. As a natural course of doing business on the Net, we place FFA (Free-for-All) links on a regular basis. We use a well-known submission service and send our link to 450+ FFA sites at a time. What happens next is an in-box barrage of autoresponse hyper-email promoting the FFA services. I can live with the delete button for that knee-jerk injection of mail however many of these companies keep sending junk mail day after day. So, as astute marketers, we always (used to) "Reply" to any spam mail with a positive business message of our own. One particular hypocrite took exception to our response to his spam and went to the pains of informing all the way upstream that we, now get this, are "spamming him, forging headers and stealing SMPT resources". Automated message? Doesn’t matter. Without the courtesy of notification we were shut down. Tried, convicted, executed and cremated without benefit of a hearing, let alone a trial. Accused by a ‘criminal’ and virtually put out of business. And for a full day, we didn’t even know we had died and gone to the real world. Now I could expect some small ISP to react in this Hitler-ish way, but not the international company we were paying for service. What made matters worse, when we starting getting complaints that 404’s were popping up we promptly wrote to the tech department. No reply from them until our death sentence was proclaimed - " Your Account Was Terminated" – a full 24 hours later! We wrote right back to the indicated reply address with an explanation of what had happened. An eerie silence for 8 hours ensued. This is now starting to curl my already curly hair. I wrote a politely direct letter to ALL the posted email addresses at this company pleading for someone to deal with this issue. Conveniently, no phone number was listed on their website and of course, no listing in their city phonebook. An entire day now passes. Now, I’m really mad!! My partner had heard rumblings that another company recently purchased our beloved webhost so I write their webmaster, forwarding the original letter and outlining the long stream of events. This is no longer a babbling brook! Finally, we get the following reply from the parent company: "We quite clearly retain the right to remove any page, site, or member as we see fit - therefore if we have gotten reports of illegal activity, or abusive activity, and we so choose to remove that member so that the problem is solved, we will do so." Is this not America? When did we start hanging citizens simply because they’ve been accused by someone else and let’s just forget for a minute that the accuser was the spammer here? Has the entire issue of UCE gone so much the other way that innocent and well-meaning netizens get the noose? Is this what the anti-spam movement envisioned as the result of their powerful efforts? I’m afraid folks that when things like this start happening, it’s going to open a whole other can of spam. I’ve taken the liberty of creating an expletive for this unfortunate phenomenon - SPAMNATION!! Too Little Too Late: A full 5 days after this incident I received a very nice email from the president of this worldwide webserver apologizing for the unpleasant situation and offering his personal assistance to put us "back up" (this was a recent server addition and we hadn’t backed up our files yet). We had by then of course started the process of moving our domain to another webhost. I did ask however, that they post our site again so that we could retrieve our files and email. Another 5 days pass and yet another sequence of unproductive communication and guess what - they can’t find them. Their policy was clearly to "delete" without hesitation! An offer to cheerfully refund our paid-in-advance fees was offered though. No kidding!! Lessons learned the hard way. Lesson 1. Always back up your server files on your computer right away. A "mirror" site is the ideal back-up if you can afford to maintain one. Lesson 2. Before you sign up with a webhost (and even with your current one), if you are dealing with large amounts of email, make sure their "spam policy" is not totalitarian. In other words, find out their detailed procedure if a complaint is received about you. Do they inform you of the complaint and allow you to tell your side of the story before any action is taken? Or, when any wacko decides to send a total lie to your "god of the Internet" do they cut you off, tell you later, lose your files and apologize when it’s too late? Lesson 3. Speak personally with the webmaster (although there are no webmasters, just webslaves I’m told) and inform him, her or it of the nature of your business and your policies regarding newsletters, opt-in email, spam mail that you receive, FFA/classified ad links/posts you receive (autoresponders messages) and any other email applications you may use. Make it clear how you utilize email to communicate and stress the point that you DO NOT SPAM! Lesson 4. Be prepared that at least once in your Internet life, you too will be a victim without recourse, a Web felon without benefit of trial, and an executed and buried cyber-criminal. After all, this is America!
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