Anti-Business Cyberpunks Hold e-Dispatch Readers Hostage!

By J. Christoph Amberger

But you don’t have to be Afghan to subscribe to the Taliban’s desiccated ideals. The urge to control what you can and cannot read is alive and well in the West as well.

Over the last few days, we have received dozens of messages from upset subscribers to the Taipan Group’s 247profits e-Dispatch, wondering why they are no longer receiving their daily message. After all, the Dispatch is part and parcel of their Taipan subscription!

The reason: this week we have been mugged by a disreputable email vigilante. A newly formed organization (domain registered July 2, 2001) based in Russia has flagged many of our parent company Agora’s domains as “spam” originators. We were put in this database without notice or any recourse to defend ourselves.

Unfortunately, the Russkis appear to have gotten their database affiliated with a more established but equally unappetizing U.S. based spam “protection” organization.

Large ISPs that use this company’s database are now rejecting our mail because of this bogus spam listing.

This is affecting our daily broadcast in two ways: 1) ISPs that use the spam database are rejecting our mail; and 2) the flood of rejected messages coming back to us is impacting the functioning of the server. Messages are taking a long time to go out (and when they are delivered is totally unpredictable). That, of course, also has the lethal potential of slowing down the delivery of our premium services!

***Our IT manager, who tried to straighten out this cyber-terrorist attack on our distribution system, wrote me:

“This organization is very slick. They provide no warning or due process… they arbitrarily decide that you are a spammer and add you to their database and they provide no mechanism to get off that database.

“ISPs get to their database through a third party, Osirusoft.com. Osirusoft is a one-man show that is like a broker of these lists. If an ISP uses Osirusoft for their spam filter then they filter people from all of the databases that Osirusoft uses - a new one of which is this Russian one. I spoke with the owner of Osirusoft, Joe Jared. He hung up on me.”

***That’s not the way free speech is handled in the USA. If you ask me, this kind of proto-Fascist meddling with your portfolios and with what you’re allowed to read is as unprofessional as it is unacceptable! It’s like having a vegan activist knock a cup of milk from your kid’s mouth - after you’ve already paid for it - because he thinks milk exploits cows.

If you have questions about our spam policies, just check the bottom of this message! We clearly meet none of the criteria these ayatollahs of arbitrary anti-commerce have made up.

My request to you: Send an email to Clueless Joe at
[email protected]
and maybe share a line or two of what you think about having your service hampered by someone who clearly has no business passing judgment. And maybe you should double-check with your ISP as well. Many of them are absolutely gutless when it comes to standing up for their clients’ rights to read what they have paid for!

Thanks to Glenn Barry for the tip - ed.