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
