Saturday, September 27, 2003

 

The national "Do Not Call" list has made the news, yet again.
Congress did something in response to the growing anger of the general population toward intrusive telephone calls from telemarketing firms. I know I am tired of these people calling me! I have caller ID on my line and I reject anyone who is "anonymous" asd I screen all calls which say it originates "out of area" which really means it comes from a place where there is no caller ID support. I found telemarketers know this and now base their operation in places without caller ID so even with caller ID, you don't know who it is. OK, so maybe I might get a legitimate telephone call from an out of area location, but if I am home, I will hear who it is on my answering machine and I can then pick up the phone and kill the answering machine. Congress established a "do not call" list several months ago. It supposedly is illegal for most telemarketeers to call any number on this national list, starting October 1st, 2003. However, it has come under fire and was ruled an infringement on the 1st amendment a week ago or so. It is back in Congress for a revision to hopefully make it such that it can still go into effect. There are over 50 million people who put their number on this list. I put my number on as soon as I found how to do it. If you registered your number (register at http://donotcall.gov on or before August 31st, you will be on the list when it goes into effect on October 1st. If registered after August 31st, then you may not be on the list until next year. Once registered, the number stays on the list for 5 years. You better believe I put my numbers on the list! Maybe I am just paranoid, but I think this list will get abused. Someone will leak it out and make a buck selling it to some telemarketeer who does not care about the law, or maybe originates outside the US where the law does not apply, and here is a big list of potential customers. It won't matter to them that this is a list of numbers who do NOT want to receive any calls, they will buy the list and call everyone on it. I think I am still going to get the same kind of telemarketing calls I am now, only the type will change from mostly reputable and legitimate, to mostly ripoffs and borderline illegal operations. I have watched the government foul it up so many times, that I find it hard to believe that this is going to work as intended. I hope it does work, I just doubt that it will.

Now if only Congress would get off their respective duffs and do something about the spam that gets into my mailbox every day. I tried an experiment a couple of months ago. I signed up for hotmail with a contrived name and information, from a public terminal, and then waited to see what would happen. All I did was login and check the mail once a day. I never read a message, nor did I send a message, just logged in to see what was there. I had spam within 24 hours for mortgages and viagra and who knows what else. I never read any of these nor deleted any. I just noted how many arrived since the last time I checked and how much disk allowance was used. The hotmail disk space allowance was completely used in 2 weeks. I never used this email address to send an email. I never wrote it down anywhere on the net. Yet, with me doing nothing except creating an account and just looking at it every day, it still got spam, and lots of it! I did exactly the same at Yahoo, and guess what! Yes, I got some spam, but compared to the hotmail account, it was a drop in the bucket. I stopped the test when the hotmail account filled to capacity. When that happened, the yahoo account only had 10 that had gotten past yahoo's system. The "bulk" mail folder had maybe 100 or so, and there was still maybe 70% of the disk allowance remaining at Yahoo. So, skip Microsoft's Hotmail and get Yahoo if you wnat a public free email address.

Posted by: Rowlfe - at: 9/27/2003 10:03:00 PM

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