Unfair
Different standards for junk mail, ordinary adverts, TV commercials and spam emails

Take for example what the Mailing Preference Service (MPS) says on its website (last accessed on 17 June): “It (MPS) will not stop mail that has been sent from overseas, un-addressed material or mail addressed to The Occupier.” That said, unaddressed junk mail or mail to The Occupier is no worse than a spam email with a wrong address that still reaches our inbox. But why are we trying to stop spam but not equally unsolicited junk mail described above?

In addition, are we not watching unsolicited TV commercials and seeing unsolicited adverts on the street every day? Why do we not complain about TV commercials wasting our time? By definition, they are also “bulk” advertising, wasting not just your time but all those who are waiting for the programme to start.

MPS director of consumer service Mike Lordan said: “We’ve just set up a scheme called Your Choice. It’s aiming to stop door-to-door distributed mail that has no name on it and mail to The Occupier.

“In theory, our members who belong to the scheme will stop delivering to those addresses. As you can imagine, the policing of that is going to be quite difficult.”

Sheffield University Dr Maggie Wykes said: “People do avoid the (TV) adverts quite easily if they want to. You can watch BBC if you really object to them. But if you are using any kind of email system, you have no option but to deal with a mail box full of rubbish.

“You don’t have those kinds of issue with TV nor do you get broadcast material on TV that’s offensive,” she added.

A Taiwanese company that sends unsolicited bulk emails
Garnering contact lists

This “Global Internet Marketing” company develops its own software that is generally known as a “web crawler” in the industry.

“It can browse loads of web pages. For example, when it browses the Yahoo Auction site where you see buyers’ and sellers’ IDs, it can harvest their email accounts and turn them into contact lists automatically,” a staff member said.

Therefore, if you leave your email address online, it is very likely to be harvested by software like this. An example to get around it is to make text into graphics so that it is unable to read what is inside a picture.

“It’s fairly easy to apply for hundreds of email accounts with our software. All you have to do is to type in verification codes,” he explained.

The verification codes refer to the numbers or English letters we normally type in, for instance, before posting online messages or before applying for an email account successfully.

The codes are often in a form of distorted text to avoid mass automatic email registration, a technology known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).

“People willingly put their contact details online in the public domain. We are not hacking Yahoo’s system nor do we secretly buy lists from other companies. So I don’t think it’s illegal,” he added.

“Email addresses are like postal addresses. They are in public areas. We can equally send emails to random addresses (without web crawling them),” he continued.

Guaranteed to reach inboxes

“The idea is to register for, say, 1,000 MSN accounts. But to the MSN or Yahoo system, it’s like 1,000 different individuals sending regular emails,” the staff member revealed and claimed emails sent by this method should not count as spam.

“Each of these accounts takes turns sending out emails for a total of about three times or more until the system blocks it.

“If you run the software 24 hours with 1,000 email accounts you’ve registered, you can send out 80,000 emails per day.

“The worst scenario is MSN blocking your accounts but it can’t stop you from registering new ones.”

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