Spamcop Blocks Facebook?

Jay Hennigan jay at west.net
Thu Mar 4 08:19:27 UTC 2010


On 2/25/10 10:12 PM, deleskie at gmail.com wrote:
> Maybe I'm wrong on this, and I'm not a mailadmin anywhere nor have I been or pretended to have been in the past. But I'm pretty sure FB only sends you mail based on the prefrences you choose, and I know this is the answer you where given so mostly a statement. How does that equal spam :)

Facebook, like many similar sites, rather aggressively requests that its
users supply their email credentials so that the site can "invite" their
contacts.  All of them.  Every stinkin' email address they can mine.

If the user/victim falls for this, the social networking site will
scrape every email address it can find in the user/victim's contact list
and "invite" them to join.  These invitations are often forged to appear
as if sent from from the user/victim's email address.

Similarly, if anyone on Facebook uses the site to forward content (often
Trojanned), then Facebook now has the address of the forwardee and will
"invite" and then 'remind" repeatedly.

So it isn't the Facebook members that Facebook spams (although they
might do that too).  It's the non-member addresses they scrape from
their members.

As it's entire contact lists that get scraped, it's bulk.  As the people
being "invited" and "reminded" didn't ask for it, it's unsolicited.  And
it's obviously email.  Put those together and you get Unsolicited Bulk
Email, AKA spam.  And those sites that send with their user's name as
the sender are even more egregious because they are forging header
information.

Social networking site users are not the site's customers.  They are the
site's product.  This product is sold to advertisers and data-miners.

--
Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay at impulse.net
Impulse Internet Service  -  http://www.impulse.net/
Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV




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