Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

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I started getting those emails just after the law changed a few years ago. Multiple emails per day. My ISP was forwarding them from some lawyer in California. I couldn't block them because they were coming from the same email that sends my bill. They were for things i'd never downloaded or even watched. A whole bunch of 8GB files of movies i'd never even heard of.

I called my ISP they said they were forced to send them to me and recommended I stopped downloading things....

First of all there's no way in hell i'm gonna download an 8GB video...period...second...i'd never even heard of those movies...so fuck that...

I looked up the lawyer that the letters were coming from, found out he was some random copyright troll and had been harassing people in canada all over the place pretty much the day after the laws changed. So I found a fax number for their office and with a handy little script...I showed them what it was like to be flooded by bullshit.

The letters stopped within a day and I haven't gotten one since.

> So I found a fax number for their office and with a handy little script...I showed them what it was like to be flooded

That is fantastic. What did the script do? Did you roll your own fax software, or use some third-party/open source binary? I'm curious because every 2-3 years I'm required to send some stupid fax, and I never really found a good (free) way to do it.

I found something that let me send an image as a fax. It was a while ago. I really searched for this. I don't think I still have it. I only ever used it for that and that was on an older computer. The script just used a binary to send an image I had prepared with some text asking them to kindly stop emailing me...well...maybe not so kindly and it sent the image as fast as a fax machine would allow. I imagine they ran out of paper fairly quick...or the machine locked up...but it seemed to work.

It was some small project I found on github or something. I had to compile it. Sorry I can't be more helpful. I think I searched for send fax from linux and variatins of that.

The vast majority of incoming fax numbers now don't physically print a fax, they just turn into PDF files, so unless you've visited their office in person and confirmed the presence of a physical fax machine, it may be a futile effort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fax

Back before this was true we were receiving fax spam advertising by the ton. Eventually I cellotaped several together, dialed their number and when the fax started sending, cellopated the end of the fax to the beginning of it, making a literal loop. I guessed (correctly) that it was an office, and faxed it in the early evening and it ran all night. I received an angry hand written fax from them the next day then nothing more.

However, those services might have a cost, so if you spam them 10000 faxes, they might hit a limit and get charged more or even block their service.

You can still fill up their inbox and greatly inconvenience them.

It's probably this. When I worked in insurance, as things got backed up, people would begin refaxing the same claim because they didn't have their check yet. So we ended up with multiple copies of many claims in our electronic queue system.

It was about that point where the company would start asking people to work overtime to try to get the backlog under control. People would fax and refax, then call and we would get an internal message from the call center asking us to prioritize this claim, etc. The behinder we got, the behinder we got because now we were having to look through multiple copies of the same file only to determine they were all duplicates and so forth.

Even without paper copies of faxes, faxing someone a ton of stuff over and over creates problems on the receiving end.

>now we were having to look through multiple copies of the same file only to determine they were all duplicates and so forth.

That sounds like a old fashioned ways in front of a problem, and in front of a solution.

There are multiple automated(or even just "hand" sorting) solutions that could chew through the duplicates.

It's been a few years since I had that job. I don't doubt things have changed in that time.

Even better. Fill up their hard drive and make the computer stop working every every day

https://linux.die.net/man/1/fax

What about the phone line though? You need a 56kbps modem or something?

Some broadband routers allow sending and receiving faxes on VOIP lines, which is handy because they are left on just like fax machines, but can be instructed to relay via email or save received faxes onto an usb key with no waste of paper.

> I couldn't block them because they were coming from the same email that sends my bill.

If you hadn't fixed it already I would recommend seeing if there is anything in the subject or body that you can use to filter the emails with.

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