Go away, Brown

So Brown has been sending us e-mail solicitations to fill out surveys. Say what? Paws off my e-mail address, Brown. Apparently they also don’t take you off the mailing list when you request it, either. One way to deal with it would be to fire off an e-mail to abuse@brown.edu explaining the situation, but Isaac Levy ’09 came up with a more fun (albeit morally questionable?) method of getting his point across:

I am extremely pissed at how much Wesleyan spams students. Brown University has started us sending us solicitations for surveys. I don’t care if the survey is for a good cause — I don’t want the emails.

I already asked to be taken off the list politely, but today I just got a second email. So I have sent their point of contact, a class dean who’s email address is robert_shaw@brown.edu a 4MB image of the ct bylaws guiding unsolicited email (along with the link). I encourage all of you to do the same (or send other large attachments to him, like setup files, long poetry, your thesis). Here’s how to get my image I sent to him:

1) Go to my homepage and right click on the file listed and click save as. Save the picture to your desktop and go into your favorite email program (or webmail).

2) Attach the file, or modify it slightly and attach it (I also suggest renaming to make it harder for him to filter out this mail.

3) Finally, here’s what I wrote:

Dear Robert Shaw,

Please stop spamming Wesleyan students. I have already asked you to remove me from your mailing list. I am asking you again. You are legally obligated to have a system to remove users from your list and are legally obligated to not send unsolicited mail.

In case you are not familiar with Connecticut’s unsolicited mail bylaws, I have attached the relevant materials (see letter b). It is taken from http://www.spamlaws.com/state/ct.shtml

Sincerely,
Isaac Levy

Copy and paste it for all I care. Or send a blank email w/ a large attachment. Just make sure he gets lots of large files.

An anonymous commenter adds,

The maximum size mail Brown’s mail servers will accept is ~15M. You could probably up the attachment to 10M fairly easily.

Go forth and unspam yourself, Wesleyan. Now to get Chase Bank to stop sending snail mail credit card applications to program house residents…