[ISOC announce] Start of Anti-Spamming WG/eMail list

Dear All,

as many of you have got aware of, spam is getting more and more annoying - and costly - in Vietnam. If not stopped now in the beginning, it might become a serious reason for private people not to use the Internet very much in the future. It is time that we try to stem the flood.

This is to announce the formation of a mailing list to fight against spam:

It looks to me, that there should be a four-pronged approach:
- Educating the public about spam.
Many Vietnamese are not aware that spam is a "bad thing" to do.
- Working together with Internet Providers to include anti-spam regulations
in their customer contracts, and to enforce them, if necessary.
- Helping postmasters to block spam from their servers.
- Trying to get legislation passed in such a way, that spamming
is a legal offense and can be dealt with by law enforcing agencies
(e.g. the police).

In order to co-ordinate those activities, we've setup a new eMail list.
Everybody interested in the matter is invited to subscribe, e.g. by using this link http://www.isoc-vn.org/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi and then selecting the "WG-Spam".
If you have difficulties, you may mail directly to me and ask for subscription.

Postmasters of Vietnamese ISPs have been in the past very responsive about spam complaints. I get repeatedly praise for their prompt actions in the past from my friends abroad. I do hope very much, that they will be also part of the list. It is usually in the very own interest of every ISP to stop spammers.

We will produce also papers etc., which will be published on the ISOC-VN website.

Looking forward to your subscription and active participation,

Cheers,
Stefan

At 15:06 06.04.2002 +0700, Viet Tran wrote:
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Attached is an interesting article related to Spamming.
Our really painful experience related to spamming in VN is still going on daily.
Everyday we received at least 40-50 unsolicited emails introducing new products,
sales brochures, specials, etc... from many irresponsible Vietnamese IT
companies (mainly hardware). Many of these emails included nasty attachments
which are prone to viruses (Doc, HTML, Excel, ... None of them uses PDF), and
huge graphic files. It takes us no less than 20 minutes to down load these
emails, 10 minutes to sort out and delete those useless ones, and then save 3-4
of our business related emails. Recently, one big name hardware vendor sent us 3
emails in 3 days which took us 15 minutes to down load each of their email (4-5
MB with graphic brochures). I did use harsh language in my replies to them. At
last I contacted the MD for this group and it was stopped. What if I did not
know anyone there ???

We have informed our ISP, VDC, but there is no way spamming can be stopped at
the delivery end of the VDC email server. So, we continue receiving and paying
wasteful telephone, internet costs and our extra time in sorting spam out of our
real emails. Imagine after a long holiday, you end up with a few hundred (450
emails) to down load and sort out. It was quite an effort. Sometimes the down
loading was broken in the middle and we had to start from scratch again. This
is a real revenue generation device for ISP and VNPT !!!
I guess, this is a common problem for most companies. Anyone else has complained
about this ? Let's form an anti-spamming list ?

Are these spamming activities supported by ISP ? This probably generates a lot
more traffic than the normal non-spamming emails. Furthermore it is based on
coercive users-pay principle ! i.e. the target had to pay for the seller's
advertising campaign. There is no way for tartget users to stop it, no way of
getting out of this hassel and wasteful costs.
My question is:
1. Is there any VN law related to online advertisement control that can be
used to sue these spammers ? Believe me I will sue them !
2. Can ISP do anything about this, considered this is an essential service to
their customers ? I will switch to the one who can stop this spamming at source
or at their servers end.
3. Any software that can be used effectively to solve this problem with and
without ISP involvement ?

Regards
Viet Tran

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