Anti-Spam law Passed in Colorado

MadShark wrote to us about a new anti-spam law passed in Colorado. It means that any commercial e-mail must have an "ADV:" label, as well as providing an easy way to opt out. But what's even more interesting is that politicians and non-profit groups must do the same as well. If a spammer violates the law, individuals can sue for $10 per e-mail, but ISPs can collect all the messages and sue the spammers for potentially millions. The question, of course, is the enforceability of the law.

Comments

Good and Bad, mostly bad, but one neat idea.

[Tackhead]

Bad:

• At $10/pop, no individual recipient of non-ADV-tagged spam is going to pursue legal action. The Washington state law that allows recipients of spam to sue for $500 is infinitely superior to the CO law.

• Remember Murkowski's bill? Now that we've got the Colorado law, we'll see tons of spam with "ADV:" in the subject line, and the language "Since we used ADV: this isn't spam, nyaah nyaah nyaah". This law legitimizes spam, rather than prohibiting it.

• ISPs can sue for $10/message. Sure, that's millions of dollars. But how many ISPs are gonna spend the bucks on lawyers just to sieze some spammer's 1965 trailer, collection of beer cans, and a few rotting buckets of chicken bones?

Good:

• The only potentially-useful aspect of the ISP provisions would be for an enterprising individual to set up an open mail relay in Colorado, and wait for it to get attacked by spammers.

  Hear me out on this; I'm not advocating open relays. Just a relay that's "open enough to give the spammer enough rope to hang himself". Sendmail on such a box could be configured to allow the first 100 spams to go through, (resulting in minimal harm to end users), and to then silently drop the next few thousands of spams on the floor. While spammers don't have the millions of dollars required to make it worth an ISP's while to sue, many probably do have $1000 or so in seizable assets, which makes it worth the while of individual Coloradans operating specially-configured relay "honey traps" to hunt the spammers down for fun and profit.

  What to do next is obvious -- use the logs to grab the spammer's IP address, contact the NOC at the spammer's ISP and mention that your relay has been attacked, and that you'd like to sue the spammer under the Colorado law. Even if you require a lawyer to obtain the spammer's identity, the cost should be minimal, particularly with the overwhelming weight of evidence of the spammer's guilt on your side.

  Once you have the spammer's identity, send a demand letter to the spammer for $500 to settle out of court - if he ignores the demand letter, drag him into court for the full $1000.

  Repeat, once for every spammer who attacks the relay. Finally, you too can make money fast with responsible bulk email!