The Lumber Cartel was a facetious conspiracy theory popularized on

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that claimed

anti-spam Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam (unsolicited bulk email). No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email (false positives) as opposed to ...

mers were secretly paid agents of lumber companies. In November 1997, a participant on news.admin.net-abuse.email posted an essay to the newsgroup. The essay described a conspiracy theory: The reasoning provided in the essay was that certain companies first destroy forests and make

paper Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distrib ...

out of them, which is in turn used to send

bulk mail Bulk mail broadly refers to mail that is mailed and processed in bulk at reduced rates. The term is sometimes used as a synonym for advertising mail. The United States Postal Service (USPS) defines bulk mail broadly as "quantities of mail prepar ...

. Since sending

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does not use paper at all, the essay argued, the lumber companies would want to stop it before it would surpass paper-based bulk mailing, and consequently only those in the pay of the lumber companies would be anti-spam. The rationale was based in

disclaimer A disclaimer is generally any statement intended to specify or delimit the scope of rights and obligations that may be exercised and enforced by parties in a legally recognized relationship. In contrast to other terms for legally operative langua ...

s in certain spam messages that they were using electronic means in order to save paper. The joke eventually led to a club and numerous

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websites, most of which have long since disappeared. Gatherings of anti-spammers on Usenet began to ridicule proponents of this theory, and many participants in news.admin.net-abuse.email chose to dub themselves as members of "the Lumber Cartel" in their

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s, followed immediately by the acronymic disclaimer "TinLC" (There is no Lumber Cartel), reminiscent of the

There Is No Cabal ''There Is No Cabal'' (abbreviated TINC) is a catchphrase and running joke found on Usenet. The journalist Wendy M. Grossman writes that its appearance on the ''alt.usenet.cabal'' FAQ reflects conspiracy accusations as old as the Internet itsel ...

catchphrase. People were able to register with a website about the Lumber Cartel and were given a sequential membership number. That was added to email sig files in news.admin.net-abuse.email and used on personal websites. There was no verification or requirement to receive the membership number.

References

External links

How the Lumber Cartel startedThe Canadian Branch of the Lumber Cartel (local 42)The Netherlands Lumber CartelThe United Kingdom Lumber Cartel in Craggy Island
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The ZhongGuo (China) Lumber Cartel, local 88
* The Jargon File:
Lumber Cartel

Glossary at the Abusive Hosts Blocklist
at

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Gambling Magazine's 1999 article on spam, mentioning the Lumber CartelThe Lumber Cartel's DNS-based blackhole listThe Lumber Cartel's "Offishul" page.
Email Spamming Usenet Internet hoaxes Conspiracy theories Timber industry

See also

References

External links