Welcome back to the lighter version of Swedish spammers. This time I will just let the evidence talk for themselves.

Junk mail “spam”, is unfortunately no longer solely a US American phenomenon, even if over there was where it once started. This plague of theft of network resources has unfortunately spread even to our latitudes, with an enormous increase in the amount of junk mail in the beginning of year 2003. In an attempt to counter-act these dark forces, on these pages I will publish Swedish spam that I receive.

Please note that this is not an exhaustive list of all Swedish spam companies, I have not saved all the junk mail that has been sent to me, which means that some companies that should have been represented on these pages unfortunately are not. I have also excluded some junk mail that indeed was in Swedish, but was sent by foreign companies. Furthermore, I only quickly scan through the list of junk mail captured by my filters, so I have missed a few, I do not spend very much time in actually reading the junk mail, it is not worthy of that.

There are two basic requirements for junk mail to be “spam”: It should be unsolicited and sent in bulk. That means that it is the e-mail I have not asked to receive, and that is sent out in identical (or almost identical) copies to several people (or, for that matter, to several of my addresses) that qualifies being published on these pages. Whether or not the subject of the advertisement is legal or not does not matter in this context, even though the majority of the junk mailers are criminals breaking the Swedish Marketing Act, paragraph nineteen:

19 § En näringsidkare får vid marknadsföring till en fysisk person använda elektronisk post, telefax eller sådana uppringningsautomater eller second liknande automatiska system för individuell kommunikation som inte betjänas av någon enskild, bara om den fysiska personen har samtyckt till det på förhand.

You can report illegal commercial e-mail to the Swedish Consumer Agency. In addition to this new law, most of the junk mail is sent in violation to the marketing act, which, among other things, requires that you identify your address source.

Thanks to the wonderful junk mail filter Bogofilter I fortunately do not have to read this and much other junk mail that my e-mail accounts are bombarded with. Nevertheless it is theft of bandwidth since the filter cannot remove the letters until they have arrived at the servers that handle my e-mail accounts.

Remember — never reply to junk mail, and never take them up on the “offers” of being removed from the list — you will not be removed, you will be added to a special list over verified active addresses, which will be even more heavily bombarded. What you should do is instead to try track down the source of the junk mail and contact the Internet service provider in charge. As long as the Internet service provider itself is not junk mail friendly it usually leads to the account of the junk mailer being terminated, which unfortunately most often only lead to them quickly re-appearing somewhere else, but it does not hurt leading these people a dog’s life.

Since I live in Norway, I have registered myself in the Brønnøysund register’ reservation against addressed advertisements for post, telephone and mobile phone. I consider electronic post to fall under “post” in this case, which means that it is against the law for companies to send advertisements to me without a prior business relationship.

Received

Here are copies of some of the Swedish spam e-mail that I have received:

$Date: 2010-03-16 22:35:23 $ | peter@softwolves.pp.se