Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Spam Legislation Tries Again...
tuiterwyk writes "CNN is running a story here about the re-introduction of a bill designed to place more control on spam and spammers.
A lot more spam seems to be coming from off shore (from a U.S. perspective of course), so how much would some of these remedies help?"
Because it's not about 'postal' or 'electronic'. Email is an anarchy...
It's about communication.
A company should not be able to 'harass' me with their communications if I do not wish them to, period. Just as a person can't.
>Spam doesn't bother me, because I don't get any.
>One of my e-mail accounts is avaible to my
>friends, the other can be seen here
>(saeru00@hotmail.com, come on SPAM me, see if I
>care).
My mom uses Hotmail. She never gives out her address online, follows all the usual precaution. Still, she got so much spam in a 3 month (I think) period that her "Block Sender" list (as if that would work, but she used it) got full - 250 blocked senders. This *is* a problem.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
All it's doing is giving ISPs and users the right to set what's allowed into their inboxes. As far as I'm concerned spam has reduced the usefulness of email by an amazing amount; I for one would like the option to put a no solicitation sign in front of my email account.
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Um . . . . Procmail ? If you are thinking about this from the ISP's point of view, and want to avoid having to stuff all the spam in people's mailboxes only to have it piped to /dev/null, why not write something that would suck in all user's .procmailrc files and do the filtering up stream (only for the /dev/null rules). Then all you have to do is educate your customers. (Oh no. Now that's a concept!)
/dev/null...
But I want it so it never reaches me in the first place. The burden should lie with the spammers, not me, and I don't see how making them put ADVERTISEMENT: in the subject line would be an overbearing thing for the government to do.
And do you REALLY trust the procmail rules of people you don't know. They could use that account as a junkmail catcher, and send everything to
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Most spam I get on the mail servers I administer is from Asian open relays. Since it is just me and businesses I know and work with closely, I may just cut of Asia, since none of us do business there anyway. If they can't configure their servers correctly, I don't want to receive *anything* from them. Anyone else thought of doing this?
yep, I automatically turf any mail with a postmark from a Korean or Russian domain.
is it illegal to actually send unsolicited postal mail?... if it isn't why would it be illegal to send electronic mail?...
Sending junk snail-mail costs the advertiser money. (Printing & postage)
Sending junk e-mail costs the *recipient* money. (Network bandwidth, /var/spool/mail/user space)
I don't like the government in my life any more than anyone else. What I want is the legal right to be able to DoS or in any other way attack the system sending me mail.
By the time spammers learn enough about computers to lock down their systems, it's likely that they'll be inundated with spam themselves.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Since it is just me and businesses I know and work with closely, I may just cut of Asia, since none of us do business there anyway. If they can't configure their servers correctly, I don't want to receive *anything* from them. Anyone else thought of doing this?
Can't do it in my case, we do business in Asia.
If the sending host (not the relay) is still pingable when I receive the spam, I either send 'em a ping of death (quick and efficient, they're all running Windows) or I portscan the crap out of them so that they can get paranoid.
Oh, and lots of nasty messages to the incompetent mailserver admin.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.