Expletive Deleted

Today I received four spam messages from some sleazy firm. The email purports to be sent by a certain Sophia Navarro (marketing3_pmi@pldtdsl.net), who seems to be working for the company called Porter and Miles. I don't know who she is, nor am I interested in her "seminars".

But what's worse is that her email provider/ISP doesn't even care. PLDT DSL is probably the biggest broadband company in the Philippines. Whenever I receive spam messages, I would forward the email to abuse@domain-name, along with a short message that the email was unsolicited and commercial in nature (textbook definition of spam). It's an unwritten rule of the internet to have an abuse@ address. But PLDT DSL doesn't have one. So I went to their site, looking for the address for reporting spam. Again, no beef.

So I tried calling them. All the numbers from the site (which are not readily available, so I had to dig deeper) are for tech support and customer support. They don't seem to entertain complaints from non-subscribers. So I settled on filling up a form from their site, with no means of attaching the offending spam messages.

If merely reporting spam messages requires jumping through hoops, less people will be inclined to report. And the ISP can look the other way, happily cashing in monthly checks from spammers.