As you all probably know by now, our Windows Live Spaces are being bombarded with Spam advertising in the comments. They post them as fast as we can report them and delete them. See my related post here: Windows Live Spam Central Reporting Service.

Greg Edwards came up with a great idea: Boycott the products that are being spammed.

Actually, a better solution would be for Windows Live Support to block the IP addresses of the Spammers. But, until that happens, this sounds like it is worth a try.

First off, I want to tell you that I went though my Reported Spammers list and looked at each of the spammer’s profiles. So far, I have reported 41 spammer accounts since October 7, 2009 when the Spam listing was added the the Report Abuse pulldown menu. (At that time, I thought our problems were over, but they were not.)

After filling in all the products, I sorted the spreadsheet, and discovered that there are only 14 products being advertised (Spammed). Apparently, the spammers keep getting new accounts in preparation of having their accounts closed.

I posted a list of the 14 products in All Things Live Group.

Just now, I read a reply to my post in the group from Greg suggesting his boycott. He thinks we should all “spam” the companies with complaint letters. Here' is Greg’s post:

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Here's a thought: why not bombard the companies who sponsor the spammers with a little "spam" of our own? Send the following form e-mail to their public email addresses and let them know what we think of their business practices...

Your company is one of the most common destinations of spam links on Windows Live. I am sponsoring a campaign to boycott your business until your company discourages and deincentivizes your advertisers from posting spam. Spammers operating on your behalf are ruining a valuable community for the rest of us who use it. There is no place on the Internet for this kind of underhanded business practice, and it does not make me want to give your company my business. Thank you.

Here are the e-mail addresses for the companies in X's worksheet:

If each member of this group would take the time to send an email to each of these companies, maybe it would make a difference.

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Greg’s post was a suggestion to the group. Now, I’m passing on the suggestion to all of you.

Here’s what I did. I took Greg’s text, and added a line above it. That way, it was easy to drag the line at the top into the subject line of the email:

Stop spamming Windows Live Spaces.

Your company is one of the most common destinations of spam links on Windows Live. I am sponsoring a campaign to boycott your business until your company discourages and deincentivizes your advertisers from posting spam. Spammers operating on your behalf are ruining a valuable community for the rest of us who use it. There is no place on the Internet for this kind of underhanded business practice, and it does not make me want to give your company my business. Thank you.

Thanks, Greg! Great idea!

X

     

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