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The definition used by ABBA Enterprises and it's owner for spam is any unsolicited commercial email, with no exceptions. Some allow exceptions for political or non-profit organizations and others, but we do not. If it was not requested and the purpose of an email message is to get money, it is spam. Due to the foolish Can Spam Act, an unsolicited commercial message may be legal, but it is still spam. Just because something is legal does not make it right.
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What should be done to those that spam?
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It is the opinion of the owner of ABBA Enterprises that anyone caught spamming should be removed from the Internet completely and permanently. Spam costs the recipients money due to required storage, diminished bandwidth, as well as time used to deal with spam. This is nothing short of theft, justified as an attempt to make money. It is very simple, don't spam and you can stay connected, but spam and you should not be here under any circumstances.
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Does ABBA Enterprises send out spam?
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Absolutely not! No commercial email has legitimately gone out using any ABBA Enterprises address since around August of 2000. Prior to that, commercial messages were sent to safe lists that were subscribed to by the owner of ABBA Enterprises. Safe lists are email lists of people who have all agreed to receive messages from fellow subscribers for the right to be able to send messages to their fellow subscribers.
If you have received spam that claimed to be from the ABBAEnterprises.com domain, it wasn't sent by anyone who had a legitimate right to use the domain. Unfortunately, mail server programs have never been set up to require a password to be sent with a valid email address on outgoing messages. Because of that, anyone can use any address and the address does not have to be valid or belong to the message sender. There are ways of determining the actual origin of a message, one of which is below as a method to fight spam. Please, do not do business as a result of any unsolicited message which uses the ABBAEnterprises.com domain, as it is not from ABBA Enterprises.
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What is the response to spam received at ABBA Enterprises?
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No one at ABBA Enterprises does any business with any identified spammer. Any address used for spamming is immediately added to the ABBA Enterprises blacklist and the address can't be used to contact ABBA Enterprises again. Any messages that meet the definition of spam used by ABBA Enterprises can also result in a spam complaint against the sender being submitted.
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What can be done to fight spam?
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There are many ways to fight spam, but ABBA Enterprises advocates three methods that should definitely be employed.
First, never ever do business or respond in any way to spam. Do not even use the links in the messages to visit the pages that the spammer wants you to go to. Remember, no matter what is being advertised, you would have lived very well without it if the message had not come. If spammers get no sales and no one views their web sites, they will eventually see that the effort to spam is not worth the return. And if the product has legitimate value, it could be sold very easily through legitimate means.
Do not send a reply or ask to be removed from the sender's list. You should never have to ask to be removed from a list that you never asked to be put on in the first place. All this does is confirm that your email address is valid. If your address is removed from that list, which is very, very unlikely, your address will be sold to any number of additional spammers. And more likely, the person you ask to remove your address will have multiple lists and you will be added to each of them.
Second, submit a spam complaint against the sender. They are stealing from you to make money for themselves. Don't let them get away with it. Remember though, as was mentioned above, the From address used probably is not valid or doesn't belong to the sender. Because of that, you will need to use a service like SpamCop.net which determines the origin of the message and allows you to send a report to all appropriate providers that are hosting anything in the message. Take this link and select "Reporting and Filtering Options.." to sign up and use this service.
Finally, use some type of program that allows you to set up a blacklist and filter out messages from addresses that have already been identified as being used by spammers. There are a number, some of which only work with certain email programs, so make sure the program you select will work with your email program. The program used by ABBA Enterprises is MailWasher, which will work with any email program. You can get this program at the following link. In addition to getting rid of identified spam without having to pull it down to your computer, it will bounce messages back to the sender as if your email address is not valid. If spammers get enough messages bounced back to them, they will be unable to figure out the valid addresses from the invalid ones. It would make it too complicated to spam.
ABBA Enterprises does not receive anything if you use SpamCop.net or the MailWasher program. They are just recommended because they are used at ABBA Enterprises.
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The ABBA Enterprises Spamming Hall of Shame
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Please do not do business with the following companies. They either send spam themselves or allow others to spam on their behalf without any consequences. I can assure you that no one at ABBA Enterprises will be doing business with these companies.
eHarmony.com - After being asked about spam on the behalf of eHarmony, Ross L., from eHarmony Customer Care wrote "It is possible that it could have originated from one of the members of our affiliate program. Please let me know as many details as possible about the correspondence you received. We will investigate this incident. If we determine that an affiliate was responsible, we will immediately terminate the relationship." Ross is a liar. After 9 message beginning on April 12th, 2007, about 9 different messages sent by the same eHarmony affiliate, spam for eHarmony is still coming from that same spammer. Obviously, eHarmony has no intension of dealing with affiliates that spam on their behalf. As long as they make a buck, that is all that matters.
PetCareRx - Unlike eHarmony, PetCareRx sends the message for themselves. The messages say to sign on to stop getting the messages. No one with an ABBAEnterprises.com email address has ever signed up at PetCareRx, which requires a password to sign on. Asking for the password for the email address that PetCareRx was sending messages to came up with a message that the address was not one they could find.
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