I promise I’ll get to more interesting topics than this old sore at some point, but it’s only Monday, and I think it counts as an update to the previous entries.
The story so far: the RSPCA encouraged people to send cut and paste faxes through faxyourmp.com, the volunteer service I’m part of. We specifically ask people not to do this, but they did it anyway, in such numbers that it broke our service. We wrote them an angry letter, and they wrote one back, formally apologising.
I say “formally” here in its “not exactly racked with shame” sense. They said they wouldn’t do it again, and stuck in a little lecture about how we really should have legal terms and conditions because what’s a big organisation to do? Mail us and ask before you shot your big gallumphing campaign emails out was my potential snappy comeback. But we kept schtum. True to our word, we wanted them to say they were sorry and promise not to do it again. And they did.
(I may be misrepresenting the tone of their mail, incidentally, but you’ll never know, because they also stuck a “Private & Confidential” note at the top of it. I imagine the enemies of the Royal Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have their spies everywhere.)
Cut to this Friday. I get mail at NTK, pointing me to this posting on news.admin.net-abuse.sightings. It’s a sample of a suspected spam mail, advertising another RSPCA campaign – one against fireworks.
The guy who received it says: “Address obtained by harvesting. No prior relationship. No address confirmation is ever sent from this address.” A couple of other people have since complained about the same mail.
Perhaps they have all forgotten that they opted-in to receive RSPCA campaign updates? Well, one is in Texas, and the other is in North Virginia, so that seems unlikely.
There’s more. The mailouts have links to Unsubscribe page that doesn’t work.They get their click via a site registered in Guatemala. The mailing company itself appears to be based in Boca Raton, Florida. One spam was mailed via an NTL dialup machine; another was sent from a server in Argentina. No offence to Boca Raton et al, but I do not think this is a very above-board double opt-in solicited mailout . This is bargain-basement, tear up the Data Protection Act, fake-opt-out five million email addresses on one CD, save on ink toner, spam.
But what has this to do with us? Check out what the spammed message asks people to do:
…
We are asking you please, to make the effort to write a letter or send an online fax your MP asking them to support the bill. Just click here here to find out who your MP is and follow the simple instructions to send them a fax.
It will only take a few minutes of your time.
If you click there now, you’ll be relayed (via Chicago, as it happens) to the RSPCA’s Fireworks site. Currently, and peculiarly, there’s barely a mention of faxing your MP, let alone simple instructions.
Now. I know there used to be simple instructions, because I spent a few minutes of my time going through our FaxYourMP referer log, and found the page where they originally told their spammed “customers” how to use our system.
This mailing, as far as I can see from the FYMP logs, was going out at around the same time as we were bitching to the RSPCA about their “Ban Hunting” campaign. They never mentioned it or apologised. And they didn’t even bother to change the wording of the spam – which is still being sent, as recently as March 8th – after they finally removed our connection to it.
Sigh.
What do we do now? Well, we’ve done one thing – we’ve banned links to FYMP from the RSPCA’s site. Their link to us on their Ban Hunting site no longer works. There’s no way we want to be associated with anyone’s lamebrained, borderline illegal, sordid little spamfest. Banning the RSPCA is our only way of steering very clear of this rogue charity’s behaviour until they clean up.
But there’s something else I want to pin down here. One of the reasons we forgave the RSPCA initially was because, in our communications with its managers, they came across as a bit misguided about how the Net works. They never relied on this defence – in fact, quite the contrary, they took time out to lecture us on how the grown-ups really operate to correct our charming naivety. But in their wording and actions, the newbieness shone through. Newbies make mistakes, even giant quasi-corporate newbies, and that’s forgivable. It’s hard to find a rule book for the Net, after all.
On the other hand, it’s also hard to be ignorant about the dodginess of spam while simultaneously signing up with a company from Boca Raton to do your dirty mailing list work. Somebody in the organisation was Net-savvy enough to set this up, and therefore Net-savvy enough to know that it was a bad, bad thing they did.
I really want to find that person, and ask them what the hell they thought they were doing.
Here’s a little discussion quicktopic to talk about this, because I imagine I’m not the only one wanting to vent at this point.