We have been fighting against spam email senders for the last few weeks!
A lot of schools have been receiving a lot of targeted/focused educational spam. This UCE/Most spam is illegal, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003. We have slightly different laws to the US.
Most of it is what we called "Harvested". This means that a company or set of companies has set up a "spider" or "bot" that searches the Internet looking for school email addresses then sends emails out to your office or school email account pretending that you have registered.
So we got tough! We have been calling these spammers and asking them if your school has explicitly requested for the spammer to send email to the school. If they say no then we explain the Can Spam act to them and request that they change their UCE/Spam policies to a slightly more legal practice.
Any if they don't? After no response for 10 days we black list the servers they send email from. The fine to be un-blacklisted is £500.
Consider this a Spam/UCE wheel(email) clamp....
Many "marketing companies" will claim you have subscribed to their services by purchasing a product and that gives them a legal right to email you. Often these companies will give you an unsubscribe option, often this unsubscribe option encourages more spam of a certain nature and is well documented by a Spamhaus(trusted source). To read information on unsubscribe options click here.
Since I posted this blog and began blacklisting servers I have noticed my popularity drop with various suppliers and vendors who use this method to attract new customers. For this reason I am considering writing a new add on for our various applications which instead of spam creates a "Marketing" folder, automatically putting marketing into a nice quiet place.
Please vote on the blog if this is something you would be interested in!
If you do receive spam you may wish to let the "SpamCop" know
If you do receive spam you may wish to let the "SpamCop" know
