Cover Your Assets

When is dealing with a spammer a bad idea?

Those who have been to my website have probably noticed the Project Honeypot graphic and wondered what the heck that is all about. Well it has to do with setting things up for your website, if you decide to set one up, in a way that discourages wanton abuse of your email boxes by sad, retarded little people who don't respect limits, like an army of happy little neon Munchkins parading through your living room with banners and bullhorns just as you set down to do your email.

Most people who visit my site visit to see what's up and to browse around in the galleries, or even contact me about commission work. Those folks will probably never notice that among the postings in the legal section is a Terms of Use agreement. They will never have any problems due to their not noticing, because they aren't for whom the agreement was written.

Just as I use a very explicit sales agreement to take control of my sales liabilities, I also take control of the manner in which my online services can be used. Which brings me to the subject of this little addition to the Cover Your Assets section.

Meet Peter Corrao. He was gracious enough to send me this little spam, using my own mailform... CYA-Spammer Example
Pete has a little picture of himself hung up on his website, http://www.taxesforcreatives.com which he probably could have skipped. No one who wants to get their taxes done, which is what he is selling, cares how dorky the person doing them looks. If they did, Pete would obviously be the go-to guy.

What people care about is that the person be
A) Competant
B) Responsible
C) Accountable
D) Insured/Bonded/Licensed
E) Accessible

Now Pete is probably at least a few of the above, but that doesn't really matter unless you happen to live in Tucson, Arizona... because lastly, but not least the person you have do your taxes should be LOCAL. If they screw up, how are you going to recover, mitigate, or even explain how you managed to declare that 3 week vacation in the bahamas "research expense?" If you are going to E-File, then using a national chain makes vastly more sense, since they routinely offer representation in cases when some aspect of the filing is called into question. If you are having your taxes prepared for you, then only using someone local to you, who is accountable to you for any mistakes for which you may become liable, makes sense. Why would anyone use someone who doesn't offer representation service? More importantly, why would anyone trust their taxes to someone who doesn't respect them enough to obstain from spamming them? Spam is the last resort of loser marketters. Spamming someone using their own contact form, against stated policies of acceptable use, even more disrespectful.


People who resort to spam to support their business usually aren't around long. They tend to get their websites closed by ISP abuse roles, and earlier this week when I checked on Pete's site, it seemed to have been both an unregistered domain and an unreachable URL. So, much for Competant, Responsible, Accountable, and Accessible.