Pretoria - Last week I wrote about spam, specifically e-mail spam, the bane of most of our lives, and what the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) is attempting to do to protect consumers from it.
The association advises that replying to an “unsubscribe” instruction in the body of an unsolicited e-mail often merely serves to confirm that your e-mail address is active and could result in more spam from that source.
A reader who has generated his own spam e-mails – and asked not to be named because of his run-ins with the ISPA – responded by saying: “If it is the objective of ISPA to prevent spam I have to say they are failing badly, and I do not see how they can ever clean our inboxes of spam.
“By far the majority of the spam we all receive is not from South Africa and cannot be regulated by ISPA. ISPA is making no difference to the irritation we all experience when we open our inboxes and have to delete up to 75 percent of rubbish messages before we can start work.”
But another reader, Geof Kirby, shared a nifty solution.
“There is another way of actively discouraging spammers who have become persistent through deliberate or just plain negligent actions,” he said.
“I’ve used the following method on perhaps half a dozen spammers and been successful every time.
“I do use the unsubscribe function or, if it doesn’t exist, I e-mail an ‘unsubscribe’ request. That’s part one. If they persist, I e-mail directly and tell them I will take serious action if they do not stop. That’s part two.
“Part three consists of a standard contract I send them which says that in return for my agreeing to receive their unwanted e-mails they will pay me the sum of R1 000 – or $1 000 for the two US-based spammers I’ve tackled – for every future e-mail from them.
“They further agree that this is an irrevocable agreement and that the laws of South Africa – or whichever country they are in – will apply.
“A guy in the UK did this and the courts agreed there was a valid, enforceable contract.”
He’s referring to Richard Herman of Middlesex, whom I interviewed for this column last November.
He got fed up with companies calling him up – sometimes twice a day – wanting to sell him payment protection insurance, which is a controversial add-on we call credit insurance.
The calls came despite his having listed his name on the UK’s TPS – Telephone Preference Service – the official, legal opt-out register.
So during one such call, Herman, who routinely records his phone calls, warned the caller that should the company call again, he’d charge them £10 (R164) a minute for his time.
When the company denied calling him, he produced the recordings, and took his case to his local Small Claims Court, claiming £195 from the company.
The company settled by paying up and Herman was hailed as a consumers’ hero.
Kirby says that sending that contract to the spam e-mailers “causes sufficient uncertainty for every spammer I’ve used this on for them to stop”.
“The amount involved is small enough to use the cheap and efficient Small Claims Court to enforce the agreement.
“I’ve also used this on the US-based gambling sites that use proxies to do their publicising. It seems to work there too.”
Love it.
What to do
l The Direct Marketing Association of South Africa provides consumers with some protection against those annoying, personal commercial intrusions – it runs its own opt-out register, and the names on this register are made available to paid-up members on a monthly basis.
If you register your name on that (go to www.dmasa.org and click on Opt Out) most of your unwanted “spam” will stop. But non-association members will continue to harass you.
l If you’ve told an e-mail spammer to stop and they haven’t, e-mail the ISPA: [email protected]
Unsurprisingly, their Hall of Shame is a long list of local companies that don’t respond to such requests: www.ispa.org.za
l Try part three of Geof Kirby’s anti-spam plan, described above.
l Richard Herman of the UK has created a website – www.saynotocoldcalls.com – in which he advises others how to go about tackling unwanted phone spam.
He had another big victory last month. He went after a law firm which wrongly claimed he’d had an accident, for damages under the UK’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Act.
He said they had committed 35 breaches of law and demanded £10 000. The firm agreed to pay him £5 000 in an out-of-court settlement.
“Each time they cold-called me I charged them £160 in damages and a further £160 for refusing to reveal who they were,” Herman told the Sunday Post. “It soon added up.” - Pretoria News