I get a ton of spam, about 50 pieces a day. It doesn’t bug me, primarily because I know I could set up my mail server to filter and reject much of it. But I do get occasionally infuriated by legitimate companies sending me spam masquerading as opt-in e-mail. For example, today I got a bit of spam with this message attached to the top and bottom:

This message was not sent to you unsolicited. You are receiving this email because you signed up as a member of SQLcare and are currently subscribed to receive special offers from SQLcare. If you would prefer not to receive future messages from SQLcare Click Here

Bullshit!

I have never interacted with SQLcare. I never ever agreed to receive e-mail from them. I can be absolutely and perfectly certain of this fact because they sent their e-mail to my internic address, an e-mail address that I use only for the purpose of registering domain names. So SQLcare, or whoever they bought their list from, culled my address from internic databases. And then they had to pretend that I asked for it. Disgusting.

Since I use PINE, I had the pleasure of viewing the source code of the HTML message without actually loading it. I noticed that they had inserted an e-mail tracking code (http://65.218.77.150/pixel/track.php?ref=324) into the HTML that would tell them whether the e-mail had been read or not. Even more disgusting.

I’m not in favor of legislation to curb spammers. Sysadmins should block spam if they don’t want it. And legislation in the US would simply drive spammers overseas. But sheesh, the dishonesty of allegedly legitimate companies is, well, disgusting.

You can find SQLcare here. But I wouldn’t contract with a lying scummy company like that to save my life.