> My name is Maya Mishina, and I am a resident of Novosibirsk, Russia.
If i received such an email, I would mark it as spam and move on with my life. Why did this blogger take it seriously? Does she take other forms of spam so seriously?
I do feel for her stress and anxiety, but I also have to question her mental ability to filter noise. Life must be quite stressful for her overall.
I see emails from cranks all the time and similarly have a do-not-respond policy to any of them, but at the same time, something like this is very slightly worrisome because it seems to be presenting the non-zero chance that some random person will sue you in your local court system.
Which even if it is completely nonsensical and has no basis in law, could cost thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and file a response to a statement of claim.
If you have ever seen the experiences of people who have been sued by sovereign citizens/freeman-on-the-land/"this is an admiralty flag" people, it would help to better understand the context I'm viewing it in.
Recommend you don’t spend “ thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and file a response” on something that you find very slightly worrisome.
Again, I think you, too, are being suckered into spam. Plenty of people fall for spam scams. It is nothing to be ashamed of. Think of all the people who fall for the fake IRS phone calls.
But learn from it: keep your guard up when you get emails, phone calls, or text messages from strangers.
Anything legally binding in the US will come to you via snail mail.
> Anything legally binding in the US will come to you via snail mail.
It doesn't need to be legally binding to be worrisome. Imagine I told you "I'm going to sue you. You don't need to do anything until you get the formal notice" and you found the statement credible. Would you go on with your life as normal, or would you be stressed and hire counsel if affordable?
My job involves DMCA pass through compliance and I have several hundred of such threats from a myriad of sources sitting in an inbox right now which say otherwise.
Perhaps you've never had thousands of people torrenting movies using you as a service provider before.
Note that the threats are not directed at me, but at my customers.
And I consider DMCA notices to fall within the category of a certain specific type of legal threat. There are also some in the queue right now that don't read like typical DMCA notices such as you might receive for downloading the mandalorian, but look more like straight out attempts at extortion (pay us right now so that we won't sue you for torrenting backdoor sluts volume XII, etc).
As to what the ultimate end user recipients consider them to be, that's up to them and their counsel.
You are wrong, and I fear the only way you and others like you will learn is if you personally receive an email from an attorney, tell them you’re going to ignore it because you didn’t get the notice via the post, and suffer adverse consequences.
I don’t know where you “learned” this false information, but I would recommend going to whatever authority figures are spouting this nonsense and correcting them.
> Recommend you don’t spend “ thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and file a response” on something that you find very slightly worrisome.
I call a lawyer any time I have a legal question for which I am not confident about the answer. If it’s not a real problem, a lawyer will be able to answer it a fraction of an hour’s worth of billable time.
What is your point? It doesn't take many resources to pick up the phone and call people. Initiative is something both privileged and unprivileged people alike can (and do) have.
And to those unaware that this is a possibility, disseminating this knowledge is our collective responsibility. Be part of the solution.
Fully agreed. I'm shocked she gave a random unsolicited emailer the time of day. Most problems are ones we create for ourselves.
Responding to spam and then feeling like you've been the victim of some injustice that the spam didn't say "hey, I'm not really spam, I'm grad-student flavored spam" is quite a take.
Here's a tip for anyone not running a business: If your response is legally required, it'll come in the physical mail. Don't take legal advice from spam, me, or your sysadmin.
Certified mail or trash, there's no way to even know if an email was really delivered to a recipient anyway. I'm aware of read receipts but they aren't reliable.
Not until you're collecting data at the scale where you'd have a legal@yourdomain team to forward anything that vaguely smells like a legal inquiry. Which is why my tip applied for "non-business" cases.
Is it reasonable to expect people to know that? If I'm below that level, what are the odds of me knowing the law well enough to know that it doesn't apply to me?
Do you think this applies in general to questions of legal liability, or is this one unique? If it's unique, why should anyone think that this case is unique? If you think in general it's "not hard" to know things about legal liability, either you're Elle Woods or you're an extremely overconfident fool.
I'm sorry but how can you make the assumption that "life must be quite stressful for her overall."? We know almost nothing about her life or what kind of situation she is in... It seems a little weird to make such large assumptions about anyone who you don't personally know!
This week only I've been threatened to have videos taken from my webcam released - unless I pay a ransom - and I was asked to pay due bills in the attached zip file twice. And that's only what my spam filter did not catch.
Given that they were targeted here, this person has a public mail address, so it's
very likely they receive similar spam. Given that and the observation that they seem to be stressed by spam, this seems like a plausible assumption.
Its just too small of a sample size to make any real judgments. One short article isn't enough information to make any meaningful comments her stress levels.
Ah I see what your saying! I personally took it more of a judgmental thing (especially with their second response) but I have no idea what the true intention was. Although I don't think my response was rude or anything, next time I will try to assume the best!
Key word is "probably"! We just don't have enough information to make any judgments about her. For example from your two comments I could say you are a judgmental individual. However, I think that would be both rude and inaccurate! One article or two comments is just too small of a sample size to get any meaningful insight on someones character!
Well of course I have, but not anything so closely resembling a spam email. If an email, allegedly from a person in Russia, asking about a law in California with regard to your small personal blog creates a measurable level of stress then what happens in an actually stressful event like say having a flat tire on the highway or having a credit card stolen.
I was contacted by my system administrator about this email, even though we chat roughly once a year; we get a lot of spam too but a legal threat is something you need to keep an eye on.
The things I would look for in an illegitimate email are not there. Where are the typos? The poor use of language? It is a very well-crafted email. The address is maybe a little off, but tons of my legitimate clients have weird emails like this.
It would have gotten my response... probably an hour of my time explaining how our policies work and how, yes, we would comply with their request even if the laws don't technically protect them. There isn't really a prefilled template you can respond to questions like this (if you actually care about responding inquiries like this) so I would have genuinely spent time thinking about the questions and giving them more than a yes and no.
I am sorry I am a different person than you and as such have different reactions to this. It looked plausible to me and the geoIP lookup on the mail server said it was in California, AFAIK this is all you need for someone to be a CCPA subject. I do not want to fuck with the legal system.
In the modern scam era we live in, it somehow seems more legit because it mentions something in a specific article of legal code, and isn't demanding payment of your IRS taxes in iTunes gift cards.
Isn’t that kind of the point? Your experience isn’t the relevant experience. Treating this email as spam is the obvious thing to do to you, but it is demonstrably not the case for others, the author included. Others don’t have access to your experiences.
The start with some Russian woman saying "hello, I'm Masha from..." triggers all sort of mental spam filters. Adding random legal codes from who knows where reminds me of "according to the CANSPAM law 134/38 this cannot be considered spam" that every spam mail used to have.
Seriously, just a few lines in this mail raises all sorts of flags.
Gives you a pause when you realize smart people probably wouldn't believe an email saying their SSN was arrested and they need to buy $500 in Amazon gift cards and send to this address to avoid being arrested by the FBI - but they totally believed a random person in Novosibirsk has rights to demand their attention and them performing various time-consuming tasks because some California law says so. I can't say such reputation for California laws is totally unearned (look up prop 65 if you want to know more on how insane it is).
Perhaps, but some people do reply to emails, for whatever reason. But that does not alter the fact that the study was conducted in an unethical manner.
Customers say weird shit in correspondence all the time and you have to fill in a lot of blanks. This would have easily imprinted “oh she lived in California at one point and wants to know if we’ll still comply with her requests” in customer service mode.
We're operating in reality where the answer to "is this even a customer" is often "unsure - to be determined", not an imagined scenario where software with 100% accuracy tells us when someone isn't.
But spam exists for a reason - it works! Some percentage of people really do respond to spam emails. It’s not ok to take advantage of those people or dismiss them.
While I have no stake in the "furry" game, the fact that you seem to think that a person should be disregarded because they're a "furry" is only very slightly above outright calling them a slur.
If i received such an email, I would mark it as spam and move on with my life. Why did this blogger take it seriously? Does she take other forms of spam so seriously?
I do feel for her stress and anxiety, but I also have to question her mental ability to filter noise. Life must be quite stressful for her overall.