By Christina Nadler
Porn, prescription drugs, penis enlargements and breast implants. Everyday, e-mail inboxes are bombarded with these, along with mortgage rates and insurance offers. “E-mail is free, so Spam is something you tolerate. As long as you have Internet access, you have access to e-mail, and for that convenience should you tolerate Spam,” said Graduate Student Lauren Bard, a criminal justice major.
Global Removal, a company based in San Antonio, Texas, (GlobalRemoval.com) will put members on a “do-not-Spam” list for a fee of $5. Once you sign up, Global Removal will compare members’ addresses with their partnering companies and have them take members off their mailing lists.
Global Removal has over 100 bulk e-mailers in a dozen different countries that clean their lists. As stated on the company’s Web site, “They have agreements with [these bulk e-mailers and] together they send well over a billion e-mails per day, every day, but none to Global Removal members.”
This system of removing Spam is different from many of the other systems used by Yahoo!, and AOL, which has members report Spam when it is sent to their e-mail.
AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham says, “This is not the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain that decides how to block Spam. It is members making an average of 9 million individual pleas each day for help.”
Global Removal was just put on a popular anti-Spam group’s list of scams. Representatives for the group, Spamhaus Project, did not respond to a request of a list of reasons for naming Global Removal a scam, however. Global Removal CEO Tom Jackson says his company’s system works. He claims it gives Spammers an incentive to cooperate because “they receive $1 for every new subscriber they bring to the service.”
“Spam is annoying, but I’m not going to pay to get rid of it,” said Emme Schultz, a sophomore political science major.
SpamCop.net founder Julian Haight said that it is unfair for customers to pay for something that is already annoying.
“You shouldn’t have to pay off the Spammers to stop Spam,” he said.
