The SPAM onslaught has increased in magnitude lately, with seemingly every second SPAM message a solicitation to become a millionaire by joining the ranks of the scumsuckers -- er -- spammers. No; scumsuckers is right. These people are ruining email, which is one of the very best things about the Internet. As a friend of mine used to say: "May their butts break out in so many pus-pimples that they go "squish" when they sit down." Pardon the indelicacy. It's been one of those days.
Anyhoo..... there is however a distinction that should be made between SPAM, and legitimate bulk email. For instance, I operate an email list, and my friend Dan Knight over at Low End Mac must now have more than two dozen email lists. Applelinks and MacLaunch both send out bulk email mailings. The distinction is that this sort of bulk wmail is by subscription.
Yesterdy I received this letter from Roy Schulze of Galleon Software, which develops bulk email software for the Macintosh, in response to a recent news brief I posted on SPAM.
For those of you who might be interested, I would like to describe our ISP problems in a little more detail in the hope that our experience might serve as a warning to anyone whose business depends on the e-mail they send, and just possibly broaden some people's attitudes towards the legitimate, commercial use of bulk e-mail.
eMerge has been available now for almost four years. From the very beginning we have promoted it at trade shows, to the public, and to the press as a tool for easily customizing and sending the e-mail you'd probably be sending anyway if it wasn't so much trouble to do so. Early on, we had recognized a segment of the Macintosh market that needed to keep in regular touch with the people on their mailing lists, and we did what we could to meet their needs.
We have never marketed eMerge as part of a crass money-making scheme. We have never sold or attempted to bundle eMerge with millions of harvested e-mail addresses. We have never used unsolicited e-mail as a way of selling eMerge. And we have consistently refused to build any features into eMerge that would protect the identity of people who might choose to use eMerge to abuse accepted e-mail protocol.
In spite of all this, we have been purposefully ignored by important members of the Macintosh press, some ISPs have blocked messages identified as having been sent by eMerge, and only recently eMerge was removed from one of the largest software sites on the Internet, download.com, because, we were told, "it could be used for spam mail."
Needless to say, over the years, all this misdirected antipathy has generally affected our sales and our ability to meet our customers' needs, but the arbitrary actions of our ISP last week made our other problems seem pretty small indeed.
At 6:00 on a Friday evening we received a form letter by e-mail from our service provider informing us that they had received "several" complaints about unsolicited e-mail messages originating from galleon.com. They claimed to have confirmed the source of the messages, and since they had sent us a previous warning, they were suspending our account. Less than an hour later, they did so.
The problem with this, though, was that there had been no previous complaints or warnings, and the single message they sent as an example of our spam, according to the information in the message header, had clearly not been sent by us or through our equipment. Someone had sent it using the crippled demo version of eMerge, which quits after sending ten messages, will only save a mailing list of ten people, and inserts an ad for eMerge at the bottom of each message.
Perhaps in an effort to fast track their investigation of this big time spam operation, the staff in our ISP's abuse department clicked on this link, found Galleon Software, and set about to close us down. But we'll never know, since the abuse department never did answer the e-mail we sent in response, the links in their message were incorrect, and they never answered their phone. Apparently, they don't even maintain a voice mailbox.
Understand, this is no fly-by-night operation. We've been with this ISP for more than four years. They were a pretty big deal when we signed up, and now they are part of Verio, perhaps the biggest hosting service in the world. Nevertheless, the weekend crawled by, and their support people never did respond to our e-mail, and come Monday, kept us in various phone queues for longer than I care to recall. Once they forwarded us to the offices of the League of Missouri Voters, the next time we called back they simply cut us off. Finally, though, at our insistence, the problem was escalated, after a fashion, to the level of "Team Leader" who informed us that he'd have to call us back.
He never did, but we did get our website back in another hour, and two brief e-mail messages explaining away what we'd already figured out for ourselves.
The suspension was unwarranted and the service was appalling, but I can't help but think that this wouldn't have happened at all weren't it for the activists who believe simply that spam should be wiped out whatever the cost, the caretakers of the Internet who set about to placate the most vocal of them without consideration for standard business practices and common courtesy, and finally the short-sighted individuals who go so far as to place the blame for the bad decisions made by a few people on an unmistakably useful e-mail application, while ignoring the fact that thousands of others use eMerge and similar applications every day to help run their businesses, their organizations, and their schools.
Don't get me wrong, I probably get as much spam as the next guy, and when I can, I'll put some effort into reporting what I consider abuse. Perhaps naively, I expect to be removed from lists when I ask to be removed, and I expect ISPs to handle my complaints responsibly. In turn, Galleon Software does its best to properly handle our mailing lists, and we encourage our customers to do the same on our website and in our personal conversations with them.
Unfortunately now, when I thought that the spam wars might finally be cooling down, we appear to be entering an even hotter phase that does not bode well for anyone doing legitimate business near the edge of this battlezone. Through whatever may come, however, I want to assure you that Galleon Software will continue to do what we can to expand people's awareness of these issues and to ensure that you, as our customer, continue to enjoy the best e-mail engine we can build.
-- Roy
