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No, it like saying that by looking at your caller ID and answering the phone you are volunteering to receive calls at your expense from anyone that wants to sell you something.

So I'm supposed to know any and all telephone numbers from which anyone I may wish to talk with may call from? How am I supposed to know whether the "Unknown Caller" is a friend in trouble or a telemarketer?

It's no different from a store owner suing people for trespassing just because they offer to sell him something.

Absolutely untrue. My e-mail address is is private property like my home address. It is not like a public store. When I provide the address of my home, it does not mean that anyone is welcome to step inside, uninvited, to sell something to me.

You can't force people to read your mind. That's what you're asking for.

No, what I am asking for is legislation that forces everyone's e-mail address to be treated the way that I described. Besides, you don't need to be a mind reader to figure out that people don't want you stealing their time, bandwidth, and storage for your ads.

I've never - not once - had a spammer forge a from address to an address of a friend or a company with which I wanted to receive mail.

Nor did I. But the addresses are forged, nonetheless, making it impossible for me to block mail from a given spammer. If Investigations2002@yahoo.com sends me spam and I block it that sender, the same low-life will send something else "from" michelle92348@aol.com next time.

That doesn't change the fact that every single one of those pieces of spam were accepted by your computer.

My computer does not make decisions for me or represent my will. It does not have intelligence. It simply implements an insecure Internet protocol (SMTP). That's like arguing that you weren't trespassing because the door opened when you turned the knob. Or it's like saying that you must have wanted kiddie porn because your mail server accepted it on your behalf.

Go here and do some reading.

here in Holland we can put stickers on our mailboxes saying I don't want any marketing leaflets and/or free local newspapers etc.

So do we in Denmark, and as of July 2000 Denmark has also banned spam.

I sympathize with your situation, but I have to disagree. These blocks were put in place because the offending ISPs refused to do anything about spam. I've been out of the anti-spam discussions on Usenet for a few years now, but when I was there, Hong Kong ISPs were some of the world's worst. Sending a complaint to them would either get you no response, or, worse, the ISP would just pass it along to the spammer, who would then likely send you a few thousand messages for your trouble. Faced with that kind of attitude, responsible sysadmins did the only thing they could: block these ISPs outright.

Now we get to the part about removing these blocks. Do you know if your ISP still has a spam problem? If it does, call them and express your dissatisfaction with their service. You pay your hard-earned money to these people, and you deserve a clean, professionally-run operation. Do they have an abuse desk that responds to spam complaints in a professional and timely manner? They should. Do they have their mail servers secured? They should. Do they know who the local troublemakers (spammers, script kiddies, etc.) are and refuse to keep letting them sign up for accounts? They should. In short, when they get their house in order, the blocks will come down. It may take a while, but it'll happen. They may want to get someone to post to a newsgroup like news.admin.net-abuse.email and let folks there know that they're working to get their spam problem under control. That will get them unblocked sooner.

If you really want to get the attention of your local ISPs, look into forming a Hong Kong chapter of CAUCE. This has been done in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and India. Go to www.cauce.org and ask them how to get it up and running. If there was ever a time to do this, it'd be now.

I've had my Canadian ADSL account for nearly 3 years how, and I have never EVER received even one single spam!

Here's little hint:

The secret is to not give your e-mail address to the spammers IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!

Sorry for the yelling, but it's just so basic!

Don't give your primary e-mail to shady characters or joe-blow websites, or small businesses business or even big businesses like mp3.com that engage in UCE. Don't post to newsgroups without munging your e-mail address. Even basic munging works wonders.

Putting your e-mail addy on a private webpage may or may not be ok. I've had mine on my personal homepages for years, and no spam. Others report the opposite. And of course if you've got a "common" email address, like joe@somethingorother.com, or if you're ISP/e-mail provider is a compromised/spamhause, you're screwed. But 90% of people shouldn't have a problem. Am I the only person with a brain?

(Too bad I didn't read Slashdot on Saturday, I could have saved a ton of you some hassle.)

While the true definition of spam is a tricky question that probably few people agree on, I think most people would agree that spam is "unsolicited commercial email" (see the CAUCE FAQ for more info.)

I don't think (at least according to the above definition of spam) that emailing your resume to a couple dozen people constitutes as spam. (It's a really stupid idea, though.) If you send your resume to a company through snail mail, they wouldn't consider it junk mail. If you send it through email (and you're sending it to just them, not to the whole world) they probably won't sue you for sending them junk mail. Just the same, it's probably better to send a real paper resume--it shows you put some effort into it other than point-and-click.

A million dipshits like you have suggested 'just hit delete,' and a million patient anti-spammers have explained why this is the dumbest solution known to man. I don't have that patience for you any more.

http://www.cauce.org/about/nonsolutions.shtml

Spam is harassment and theft of service, plain and simple. It is not the same as P2P and you are a moron if you think they are remotely similar.

Are there any groups that are actively standing out against spam and lobbying the politicians? If so, I'm ready to join, if not, I need to start one.

CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email)

They have links from their home page to related regional organisations, including EuroCAUCE (European branch)

Are there any groups that are actively standing out against spam and lobbying the politicians? If so, I'm ready to join, if not, I need to start one.

CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email)

They have links from their home page to related regional organisations, including EuroCAUCE (European branch)

1. Do not post your email on a website or in newsgroups.
   
   
2. Use a separate email address for subscribing to web sites. If that email gets spammed, change your email on web sites you want to continue to use, delete your second email and create a new one.
   
   
3. Use 2 emails, one for your job and one for your private use. That way, you won't get porn or stupid jokes at your job and your company won't monitor your private emails.
   
   
4. Never reply to a spam. If you have to unsubscribe, do it on the web.
   
   
5. If you want to put your email on the web or in newsgroups or on any system that can be digitally scanned for emails, disguise your email so that only a human can read it. Example myname@isp.com becomes myname(AT)isp(DOT)com.
   
   
6. Use a tool for filtering your incoming email.
   
   
7. Never forward an email chain letter. They are all scams. If you absolutely want to forward one, check the information before.
   
   
8. If you have subscribed to mailing-lists, check or ask if it is indexed on the web and if your email is diclosed there. Ask for removal or dedicate another email to that list that you will delete/change when it gets spammed.
   
   
9. If you have time, read the headers of spam emaiks and complain to the ISP that the spammer used.
   
   
10. There are many tools and advice on the web:
    abuse.net
    cauce
    

I found 2 quotes on similar issues, both apply here.


"[They] have come to court not because their
freedom of speech is seriously threatened but
because their profits are; to dress up their
complaints in First Amendment garb
demeans the principles for which the First Amendment
stands and the protections it was designed
to afford."


Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin , Turner Broadcasting v. FCC

And:


"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen
to or to view any unwanted communication,
whatever its merit. . . We therefore categorically
reject the argument that a vendor has the right
under the Constitution or otherwise to send
unwanted material into the home of another...
We repeat, the right of a mailer stops at the outer
boundary of every person's domain."



No name to accredit it to, but: Rowan v. U.S. Post Office

Quotes taken from http://www.cauce.org/about/faq.shtml#censorship

Please support the effort to outlaw spam. See CAUCE for more information.

I found 2 quotes on similar issues, both apply here.


"[They] have come to court not because their
freedom of speech is seriously threatened but
because their profits are; to dress up their
complaints in First Amendment garb
demeans the principles for which the First Amendment
stands and the protections it was designed
to afford."


Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin , Turner Broadcasting v. FCC

And:


"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen
to or to view any unwanted communication,
whatever its merit. . . We therefore categorically
reject the argument that a vendor has the right
under the Constitution or otherwise to send
unwanted material into the home of another...
We repeat, the right of a mailer stops at the outer
boundary of every person's domain."



No name to accredit it to, but: Rowan v. U.S. Post Office

Quotes taken from http://www.cauce.org/about/faq.shtml#censorship

Please support the effort to outlaw spam. See CAUCE for more information.

Of course, when forged headers are used (as is mostly the case) you rely on the cooperation of the ISP to obtain the users identity.

Cauce has a pretty good tutorial on examining mail headers for useful information, if you're interested.

I was placed in a similar position when I was CTO of a company and the marketing weenies decided to start a spamathon.

Remember that the main motivator is money when you're dealing with marketing/sales people. If ethics won't sell them on the spam=BAD equation, then use money to do it. I wrote a lengthy memo (I don't recall whether I saved a copy or not) describing the possible negative side-effects of starting a spam campaign.

The primary negative was revenge. Ask them how they'd like to have their 800# shut down by people calling to complain, or how they'd like their main Web site (not just the spam machine) and network compromised and destroyed by anti-spam hackers. Ask how they'd like the fax machine to be constantly busy and out of paper. Ask how they feel about hauling in the lawyers to respond to complaints that they've violated California's anti-spam law (you don't have to be in California--you just have to spam someone in California). Even if they can show they didn't violate the law, it'll cost money to fight it.

When I made this argument to the marketing guy, he said that if someone did that to us, they'd be breaking the law. I told him that wouldn't prevent people from doing it! I also had him read CAUCE propoganda and other anti-spam materials.

I'm not sure whether he ended up seeing my point, or gave up out of frustration having to deal with me, but he gave up.

There are several bills working their way through Congress. And there's one that addresses spam in SMS messages. You can read about it here. If you want to see a list of several bills pending in Congress, CAUCE has a page describing them.

There have been bills that effectively legitimize spam, and ones that basically prevent it. HR 95, which is in committee right now, is a very good anti-spam bill.

--

Even that could be argued. CAUCE has been promoting an SMTP-banner-based, machine-parsable policy. Someone with such a banner would be in a better position to claim that the spamming was unauthorized access.

Even that could be argued. CAUCE has been promoting an SMTP-banner-based, machine-parsable policy. Someone with such a banner would be in a better position to claim that the spamming was unauthorized access.

• Never buy from it - In getting rid of roaches, rule #1 is to remove their food source. Same thing here. Spammers only spam because they think it will profit them.
  
• Report it - I use SpamCop; it does 95% of the work.
  
• Automatically reject it - Tell your MTA to make use of the spammer blacklists at MAPS and elsewhere.
  
• Tell your friends - Most people don't realize that spammers inflate ISP fees and reduce service quality by clogging servers with garbage. Educate them!
  
• Tell your legislators - Some countries and US states have already outlawed spam. To help make this universal, you have to let your legal reps know how you feel. Check out The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.
  
• Don't do business with spamhausen - Especially if you are a network admin, don't do businesses with companies that profit from spam. Check out spamhaus.org and spamsites.org for details. And make sure to let the sales droids know why you won't buy from 'em!

One solution, endorsed by CAUCE is to instead rely on a "NO UCE" banner added to the mail server's banner. This has some obvious drawbacks (it's not per-user and requires administrative intervention).

A slightly better solution for an opt-out list (I won't argue the merits of opt-out versus opt-in) would be a list of the MD5 hashes for each email address. The downside would be that this would prevent regular expressions to handle any and all valid variants of an address. One partial fix would be to require that the spammer query a number of variants of a given address. For example, if the address were "erasmus@foobar.invalid", we could require that the query both "erasmus@foobar.invalid" and "@foobar.invalid" for MD5 matches.

A slightly different alternative would be a query-only list maintained by a trusted party. So internally the list might have "erasmus(\+[^@]*)?@foobar\.invalid" but all the spammer would get back would be a "do not spam this address" when they attempt to query "erasmus@foobar.invalid", "erasmus+foo@foobar.invalid", and so forth. The downside is that this requires a central authority that can be trusted with email addresses (not too hard) and is extremely competent with security (much more difficult).

Sneakemail.com is a more proactive defense for a user fighting spam- used alone or as a backup. Using it on slashdot I've already seen it do its job against (possibly) seven spammers in the last few months. Apparently, a lot of harvesting goes on here, so be sure to mangle, use your junk account, or use something like Sneakemail. Sneakemail also has a link from the above mentioned spamcop, as well as www.cauce.org and junkbusters, which are also good resources.

CAUCE has an RFC on setting your SMTP banner to report not only your UCE/UBE preference, but your locality for legal situations.
For example, our SMTP banner (provided by SMTPd of the Juniper Firewall Toolkit) says this:
220 Machinename NO UCE C=US L=CO ready.

By the way, I've heard good arguments why none of those things would help at all. The quick list:

Saying that they can't forge the header is a nice gesture, but it's only a small improvement. Many spammers broadcast from ISP accounts that are shut down within hours anyway.

The problem with subject tags is that it doesn't eliminate the cost-shifting. Spammers still get a free ride and everybody else pays to deliver and process their junk.

The problem with opt-out lists is that you still have to receive it. Spammers get one free bite. It wouldn't be *too* bad if it were just that, but all they have to do is "change" their "company" and they get another free bite. Repeat indefinitely. In general, opt-out is not a good solution.

And all this is assuming that they actually honor the law at all.

--

No. Spammers are those who send out Unsolicited Commercial Email. Hence CAUCE

According to Sec 5.(c).(2) of the bill passed by the house concerning UCE's:

INNOCENT RETRANSMISSION -- A provider of Internet access service that facilities of which are used only to handle, transmist, retransmit, or relay an unsolicited commercial electronic mail message transmitted in violation of subsection (a) shall not be liable for any harm resulting from the transmission or receipt of such message unless such provider permits the transmission or retransmission of such message with actual knowledge that the transmission is prohibited by subsection (a) or subsection (b)(1).

Does this mean that if I have an open SMTP server I can be held liable for junk e-mails flowing through my system? I'm not saying this is all that bad but do we really need the force of government to get people to secure their systems?

If an online 'White Power' organization were to be established, that posted lists of Websites they objected to, for itemized specific reasons, would that be considered legitimate?

Rejecting your email is legal. Giving me a list of people that you're rejecting because I might want to reject their email for the same purposes would also be legal.

These people are not suing RBL because it is improper for them to be on the list. They are suing RBL because they disagree with the criteria for being added to the list. Vixie & Co. don't say "these people are spammers". They say "These people do one or more of these N things that we really disagree with -- mostly because they cause us problems.
============
As to the question of legislative vs technical solutions:
Theft is illegal. There's already legislation against it. A couple of weeks ago I left my window open. Some bastard snuck in through the open window and stole my laptop. Locks are a technical solution to a problem that already has a legislated solution.

Even if CAUCE is successful in getting effective legislation against SPAM, prosecutions and lawsuits are expensive and slow (often taking years). If only for that reason, RBL will remain as at least a stopgap solution.

As for the spam - I've been using this notice to scare off spammers for a while now... I even use it at work in response to junk faxes:

I deny to receive any non-subscribed commercial mass-mailings free, if such mailings are sent to me, I reserve the right to charge sender $500.

Disputes of this fee may be resolved in court.

"By US Code Title 47, Sec.227(a)(2)(B), a computer/modem/printer meets the definition of a telephone fax machine. By Sec.227(b)(1)(C), it is unlawful to send any unsolicited advertisement to such equipment. By Sec.227(b)(3)(C), a violation of the aforementioned Section is punishable by action to recover actual monetary loss, or $500, whichever is greater."

Seems to me that someone could be collecting some money if eBay is misusing user info.

Full legal text USC Title 47, Section 227

Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail

===================

I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV.

1. Forging headers/contact info on commercial e-mail is illegal. Noncommercial e-mail is not affected.

1. Using somebody else's mail server to send commercial e-mail without their permission is illegal.

1. "E-mail service providers" can post a policy, either on their Web page or in the SMTP banner, as to whether or not they allow spam to be sent
2. to their users. Violators of the policy can be sued by the ISP for $500/message.

1. Commercial e-mails must be identified as such with "ADV:" in the subject line.

1. End-users may sue spammers for $500/message if the spammer does not honor "do not mail me" requests.

1. The Federal Trade Commission has the power to go after unrepentant spammers.

More info is available on the Web sites of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE, www.cauce.org) and the SueSpammers Project (www.suespammers.org).

John Mozena
moz@cauce.org

In general, I support cauce and their put-the-power-in-the-hands-of-the-people-not-the-g overnment philosophy. So if cauce likes it then it's probably a pretty good idea. If you hate UCE then consider joining cauce. They do lobby legislature and the quantity of their members adds to their political ability.

--

In general, I support cauce and their put-the-power-in-the-hands-of-the-people-not-the-g overnment philosophy. So if cauce likes it then it's probably a pretty good idea. If you hate UCE then consider joining cauce. They do lobby legislature and the quantity of their members adds to their political ability.

--

Yes, I sit on CAUCE's Board of Directors, BTW, and it irritates us to no end when people like you jump to conclusions without bothering to ask us our side of the story.

Yes, I sit on CAUCE's Board of Directors, BTW, and it irritates us to no end when people like you jump to conclusions without bothering to ask us our side of the story.

http://www.antitelemarketer.com/ - Anti-telemarketer website, lots of information and information on laws

http://www.telemarketing-laws.com/ - More of the same

http://www.suespammers.org/ - Information on how to sue spammers under existing state laws

http://www.cauce.org/ - A grassroots advocacy group for Federal anti-spam laws

Share and enjoy.

do we really _want_ spammers to be regulated, or to even have spam outlawed?

Remember, this would be done by the same people who brought you the DMCA.

It occurs to me that projects like the Real Time Blackhole List or Sendmail's anti-spam configuration options serve the cause a lot better than blanket laws passed by technologically less-than-aware legislators?

It's quite possible that lobbying organizations like DMA actually help the idea of keeping the net free of legislative overkill in the long run...

Comments?

How many times a day do you want to press that "Delete" key? 5? 10? 20? 100? 200? 1000? 10,000? ...? Spam grows and grows, because once your e-mail address gets on a spam list, you will NEVER get it off. Those "remove" addresses are either fake or tell the spammer "hey, this is a real address!" and the spammer can make more money selling real addresses than removing them from lists.

You probably receive less than 10 spams a day. Lucky you. Many people in the U.S. have been forced to abandon e-mail addresses because they receive too much spam. 200 spams a day is often the number at which e-mail becomes unusable.

How much does each spam cost? When you add up storage costs, transmission costs and the like, you may find that the cost to the recipient of a spam is about one cent (precise currency doesn't matter). Not much? OK, now imagine getting 200 a day (might be over multiple e-mail addresses). Now that's $700 a year. Would you prefer to keep that $700 for yourself, or spend it receiving crap that you never asked for and that you do not want?

Also imagine that you take 5 seconds to identify each spam and delete it. At 200 spams a day, that's 1,000 seconds a day, about 20 minutes per day, 120 hours per year. Would you rather spend that time deleting spams or doing other things?

Receiving a spam is like being bitten by a mosquito. It's annoying in small doses, but intolerable in large doses. If you were being bitten by 200 mosquitoes a day, would you put up with them, or would you put up flyscreens? If you receive 200 spams a day, would you put up with them, or would you want this blatant abuse of the Internet outlawed?

If you are still unsure as to why spam is a problem, please visit the The Coalition Against Commercial E-mail website for more information.

--

Spud Zeppelin dun said:

Really, we shouldn't allow the medium to dictate our metaphor here: how is spam really all that different from someone approaching you on the street and asking "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"

Well, among other things, it doesn't force me to store his offers for watches on private property, and it doesn't cost me money and/or labour costs to listen to him try to sell fake Rolexes, not to mention telling him to perform impossible acts of self-copulation with aforementioned watches. ;)

The same cannot be said of spam (including UCE). First off, the vast majority of sites with full-time Internet connections pay by the byte or by the hour (and, especially outside North America, a non-negligible number of home users, too; UUCP connections (where you HAVE to download all the mail) are still relatively common in Europe, Asia and South America, and are STILL some countries' only connection to the Internet (if memory serves, Mongolia's main ISP is UUCP-only, and this is also true for most African ISPs outside of South Africa and africa.net accounts), and people in most countries pay by-the-minute for phone calls period (incidentially, most countries also ban telemarketing--North America is one of the few places where it is legal--because it costs folks to receive it; this is also why junk faxes and telemarketing calls to cell-phones are illegal even in North America)...); the costs are often non-negligible, especially with the volumes of spam being sent (I did a quickie analysis around two years ago, which is posted here under the title "Spam By The Numbers"--this gives you a really good idea of the sheer amounts of crap that get sent to your local ISP daily if they aren't using specific block-lists like the MAPS-RBL list; nowadays it is also probably a very conservative estimate--with big mailspams on big ISPs, it can easily hit the gigabytes). This cost will, eventually, be passed on to the consumer-level (stuff like unlimited access being cut, or prices going up because they have to pay for the new RAID-5 array just to store all the spamaceous crap), so don't think you home users get away without paying the costs of spam.

Secondly, tracing down a source of a spam and getting them to stop spamming you is not exactly trivial. Spammers very commonly use throwaway accounts at freemail providers (and previously, AOL, Netcom and Compuserve accounts due to the sheer number of "free trial" CDs they would give out) and will obfuscate the hell out of headers (this is, in part, what the Washington bill was aimed at); not only that, they will often "relay-rape" servers, routing spam through insecure third parties' mail servers (there are a rather surprising number of these out there--Sun and SGI have notoriously insecure versions of Sendmail shipped with their programs, boxes in a lot of third-world countries and @Home boxes are insecure, and I won't even go into Windows mail daemons or mail daemons on old IBM mainframes--suffice it to say that spammers are the main reason most sites worth their salt don't relay mail anymore except for customers, and an increasing number won't even let you post mail without downloading mail first--Mindspring and Broadwing, among others, had to implement this). To make things even worse, spammers have over the years either set up shop at outright spam-friendly ISPs or at sites that couldn't be bothered to give a damn about net.abuse; at one point an entire backbone site on the 'net, Agis.net, had to be literally "IDP'd" (basically: many, many sites started refusing to share any traffic--not just mail and news, stuff like FTP and HTTP and the like) because AGIS hosted literally seven or eight of the worst spammer's havens on the Internet (including Sanford "SpamKing" Wallace's site, etc.) and refused to give them the boot after nearly EVERY other national-level ISP at the time HAD given them the Golden Boot. (Eventually AGIS did boot them and wrote up a strong, anti-net.abuse AUP. The AGIS boycott wasn't trivial--they were literally the third or fourth largest site on the net, many national-level ISPs had them as a primary or secondary network service provider, and they provided the only network service for a lot of sites including all of Alltel's Internet network.) And to make things even WORSE, many (if not most) spammers actually use "remove lists" or "do-not-spam" lists as actual confirm-lists for live addresses to spam; these lists are even bought and sold among spammers, and it is literally next to impossible to get one's address off one of these lists once they have been added on (about the only way I've found is for the email account itself to go dead).

It doesn't help that most of the folks in the "serial spamming" business--the hard-core folks-- are sociopaths (no, I am not making this up--most of them would actually be diagnosed as sociopaths). Sanford Wallace, for example, was in the junk fax business before he went to spamming--he is also widely regarded as being the person most responsible for junk faxes having been banned. Wallace is also almost singlehandedly responsible for most of the anti-spam AUPs in place, with a few other folks was largely responsible for getting AGIS "shunned" a few years back, and is almost singlehandedly responsible for nearly every anti-spam bill that has been proposed to a legislature worldwide. He finally got out of spamming when literally no ISP in North America would touch him with a 40-foot barge pole--and this, only AFTER he'd gotten AGIS IDP'd, been fined well into the millions of dollars for contempt-of-court charges, been literally banned by a Federal court in Ohio from sending mail to any customers of Compuserve, been banned by a Virginia judge from sending any mail to AOL customers, been fined by that judge for disregarding that order, paid well over US$300,000 in Internic charges for domains...this is the psychology we're dealing with. Sad individuals...

It's funny you should mention guys "selling watches", though. If he makes it a business as much as, say, most spammers do, just selling watches on the street is outright illegal in many areas. If it's over a certain volume, in many places he has to buy a specific business license. If he is found selling illegal goods (like, oh, counterfeit watches or selling adult material to under-18s or selling shares in a pyramid scheme or even selling stocks without a prospectus) they can lock him up and throw away the key.

Of note--the FTC has estimated that over 80% of all spams are for "fraudulent" and/or outright illegal schemes. Those that aren't are often adverts for adult sites which are of questionable legality for under-18's (and, depending on local ordinances, may be of questionable legality for anyone--for instance, adverts for marital aids and the sale of marital aids is illegal in Alabama and in a number of Southern counties).

In short, there are a lot of differences. You might visit CAUCE here, or spam.abuse.net for detailed info on the history of spamming and the real costs to Internet users. Those of you running Linux and *BSD boxen might want to in particular hit spam.abuse.net's info on securing your mail server, or hit Sendmail's web site which, along with the latest version, has extensive info on spamproofing your mail (including blocking open relays and spamaceous sites through the MAPS-RBL and stopping Bad Guys from relay-raping your server).

So what's the difference between getting an email from some unknown person saying that you can order his book for $39.95, and getting a circular in your mailbox from some unknown person/company saying the same thing?

As has been mentioned in other replies else-thread -- the reason that spam is Bad is that it shifts the burden-of-cost of the advertising to the consumer, rather than to the person doing the marketing. I have not yet seen a link given to CAUCE, the Campaign to Abolish Unsolicited Commercial Email, but it is a highly informative site that can answer a lot of questions. Such as:

<QUOTE>
"Why can't you just hit and be done with it?"
Unfortunately, pressing Delete may make the problem disappear from your mailbox. But by the time you get to press the key, the costs associated with that piece of junk email have already been extracted from your pocketbook. Hitting Delete is a little like hitting the "snooze" button on your alarm clock: you may have bought the appearance that all is well, but it only works for a few minutes... and the more you hit it, the deeper in trouble you are.
</QUOTE>

I've watched this debate play itself out many, many times before, and I have to say that I'm on the side of the anti-spammers.

Perhaps the best /.-centric analogy is if each reader had to pay Rob & co. for each comment viewed. I'll bet that if that happened, there'd be a whole lot more anger directed towards the Naked and Petrified folks -- why should we have to pay to see their garbage? Why should I have to subsidize someone else's advertising budget with my mail servers?

Haddock, Salmon, Pike, Bass, Cod, Tuna

I knew this kid named Jimmy when I was growing up. Jimmy was, how shold I put it... "Special". Jimmy loved to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That's why I think pb & j is the appropriate smell for these guys

Nervous sweat is the smell for these guys and these guys too

For these guys it's obvious, rocket fuel.

And in the same spirit, that vomitey, greasy, sugarey, metallic smell you find near big rollercoasters for them

And the muddy, porcine smell you'd find around that prize-winning heiffer that just keeps eating and getting bigger for these freaks. Of course you know that animal is the main ingredient for the spiced ham smell that you'd find here

The next step is to put hotmail and AOL on the RBL!

Stop the SPAM!

BZZZZTTT!!!! I'm sorry; 30% is not "minimal".

I really shouldn't bother to finish reading a post in which basic ignorance is displayed in, literally, the first word, but having nothing better to do at the moment....

["first we should create a perfect world" rant snipped]

OK, folks, if you want to pick somebody's pocket, here's your man. His principles will absolutely forbid him from sending the police after you until there is no longer any murder, rape, car-jacking, or other crime more serious than pick-pocketing.

Its far cheaper and more respectable to Take Care Of It Yourself than to get the government to Do It For You.

I'm glad we agree -- by all means, the government should simply step out of the way and let us take care of the spammers, just as I suggested.
/.

This is why CAUCE is fighting to hard to defeat these SPAMMER backed bills in favor of truly outlawing unsolicited business email.

The EuroCAUCE website is at: http://www.euro.cauce.org/

Schwab

See the CAUCE home page