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Receive Spam, Make Money!
Bud Dwyer writes "Wired is running the heartening story of Bennett Haselton, who was awarded $2000 from spammers under Washington state's anti-spam law. From the article: 'Spam fighters hope that if enough individuals take spammers to court, it could eventually drive the industry out of business. And, some savvy individuals could make some easy money along the way, and with a clear conscience, too.'"
I'd love to take these weasels to court, since I'm getting about 30 spams a day and a one week vacation can result in lost email due to a clogged mailbox.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Probably won't be that easy to collect, especially if they didn't even show up in court. I'm just not sure the idea of driving the industry out of business is feasible; the vast majority of spam mail I get doesn't have a valid e-mail address. In fact, the vast majority of spam I get isn't really advertising. Most of it are just grifters trolling for victims, figuring if they send a million messages out, and get 3 marks, they'll make a profit.
But our laws do not usually reach outside our borders. As this gets more notice, less and less spam will originate from within countries that prosecute. But the spam will not diminish.
This is not the fix. But it is always nice to see a spammer lose what they love most: money!
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
.. until I start receiving a load of "received spam-mail? Make money NOW!" messages in my inbox?
was where the guy gave a link to someone that shows others how to do this exact same thing. Try http://www.wa-state-resident.com/tugpayup.htm (unlinked for the goat weary).
He gave a form letter, even step by step directions on how to do this. Only thing was that you would have to be living in oregon unless your own state has fun laws like this. That does definately sound like fun.
I realize that most of you probably already know about this, but I am going to mention it anyways: if you're having problems with spam, you should go to SpamCop. They have a free service that you can use to report spam to the necessary network administrators via parsing the headers of the spam mail. Simply save a bookmark that they give you, and when you receive spam mail, go to that book mark, paste in the whole text of the spam mail (including headers) and click a button.
I know that it's hard to keep spammers from doing what they're doing due to their using different email addresses and hosts each time they send out some spam mail. But I have found that by using SpamCop regularly, the spam mails eventually stop coming to my inbox. And whether this means that they've been taken out of business or they're removed me from their spam list due to my being a thorn in their side - well, either is good enough for me.
It's about time spammers started paying for their sins.
Spamming is basically a form of theft, externalizing around half the cost of sending an advertisement to the reciepiant of the spam. That's clearly what makes spam attractive to advertisers (and their swinish lobbyists, the DMA).
The second order effect of this externalization hasn't been talked about in the press much. Ordinary advertising costs up front - a Tee Vee commercial for laundry detergent gets paid for before you buy the Whisk. A two-page spread in Time magazine for the latests SUV gets paid for before any consumer buys a 2002 Yukon. And yes, the company doing the advertising prices their product to account for the ad expenditure.
The fact that a spam victim pays for the ad before making a decision on whether or not to buy the laser printer toner means that market forces controlling advertising are vastly weakened. For example, the makers of "Whisk" laundry detergent used to have an ad campaign based on the phrase "Ring around the collar". During the mid 70s, the Women's Movement found this ad campaign offensive, so they boycotted "Whisk".
Fast forward to 2002 - you've already paid to receive an ad for Hotwet Russian Teen Sluts. No boycott on earth will have an effect on the advertiser - you've already paid for it, without being given a choice in the marketplace (maybe you prefer Hotwet Bulgarian Teens).
There's only very weak market forces that affect spam. We need government regulation of spam, we need the ability to punish spammers economically.
I just installed Spambouncer, a procmail-based set of filters, on all of my servers over the past few days. I love it. It takes a little tweaking, but that's easy enough. It was not a problem to set up, and I've gone from a dozen or so UCEs per day to one or two. After a few more days of tweaking, I should be down to zero.
ObCompliment: Go Bennett, it's your birthday, go Bennett, it's your birthday! [1]
-Waldo Jaquith
[1] I am so white.
Spam is one area where a very aggressive attorney making a career out of class action suits would be doing a public service. Some clever attorney out there ought to get on the ball with this.
Tastes Like Chicken
Possible new Spam trend:
From: dj898f78ds@hotmail.com
To: (undisclosed recipients)
Subject: Make Big Money Suing Spammers!
Hi, Friend! Are you bothered by Spam clogging up your mailbox, hard drive and embarrassing you by it's content? Worry no more!
For $25 we'll show you how to get rich by suing spammers! Send payment to:
O. B. Laden
Cave #1248
Tora Bora
Afghanistan
Act now, before it's too late!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Is anyone familiar with the encoding used for Chinese (or at least how it displays in a Latin character set) to put together a regex that would catch most of these spams?
/dev/null.
I get plenty that are obviously not in English and it seems there should be a (set of) regexs that could pretty reliably tag it as non-English and route it to
I wouldn't mind taking action of this nature against spammers, if I could figure out who to take action against. When spam arrives with no usable return address and no valid telephone number, who do you take to court?
sPh
I find it quite interesting that while many users of the Internet are quick to claim that 'information wants to be free' and to fight against censorship and restriction of their liberties, spam remains an area where the same people rush to seek legislation.
Surely these things must work both ways? If we have the right to send email to whomever we please, and to do so without the content of our email being checked by a third party, shouldn't that privilege extend to companies wishing to promote a product - however irritating it might be?
Before anyone flames me: I did read the article, and I realise that the case cited was based upon the forging of the 'from' address, which rendered the spam illegal. But is even this a 'fair' thing? If I were to send someone an email address with faked details, wouldn't that be my prerogative?
Perhaps where things need to be tightened up in order to address the problem of spam in a consistent manner is in the area of unapproved use of resources like SMTP servers. Instead of the recipients of spam being able to sue, it should be possible (and easy, and effective) for those whose resources are used by spammers without concent to take action - and the crime should be treated in the same way as would theft in the material domain. If spammers were forced to use their own servers, the act of blocking them out would be rendered easier; and if they were to face criminal charges when using other servers, then I'd wager we'd soon see matters improve.
Incidentally, I'm not a sysadmin and if I'm talking crap, please forgive me. But it seems to me that piecemeal court cases filed in small claims courts are going to do very little, very slowly.
Actually, I have had a debate about that and came to the conclusion that you SHOULDN'T send back prepaid envelopes just to get back at bad companies.
Why not? Because you will hurt everyone eventually.
Not every ad mailing will be enjoyed by every receipient. But at the same time, there are occasional random mailings we all actually like to get. By mailing back prepaid envelopes empty (or full of junk), all you do is hurt the industry's profit margin. That won't mean less junk, it will mean less prepad envelopes, since that will be the easiest way for them to save money. And then you won't have prepaid envelopes for the stuff you actually want to send for.
Just throw them away or write to that giant clearinghouse to be taken off the main list.
------
Let me give you the lowdown
This guy is great. I remember peacefire.org from back in the day. He helped me fight a censorware install at the schools at which I was teaching. I wonder if he is still selling those groovy t-shirts.
there's quite a bit of info about this stuff at wa-state-resident.com
I've tried spamming back people who spam me, with thousands of emails, and random subject and bodies. That makes me feel good. It is a hog to run on my computer though.
Now i just send them a bill with PayPal. I haven't had any responses yet, but i think they definitely owe me something for wasting my time, bandwidth, and storage. Maybe some lame spammer will cave and pay me the $30 that i billed them
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
If the spam doesn't have a valid email address, and doesn't provide any reliable contact information by which to track down the offenders, how can the spammers expect to hook anyone on their crap schemes?
After all, if it is just as difficult to chase down the spammer, as it is to try and take advantage of whatever they are offering..
I can see how this might work for some types of spam.. The 'hot stock tip' bit for example simply counts on someone out there buying a stock to drive up the price..
But when there's a product or service involved? Whom do you pay? And if you know whom to pay, you know whom to sue..
I get as much as a few dozen bits of spam each day at my 'public' address.. And these are the ones that I can't 'umbrella' filter by country, domain, etc.. Most of these are not even in English, or from the US.. Spam laws don't work in the areas most responsible for pumping out spam..
Sad waste of bandwith, tis all. And the spammers are counting on the fact that it is much easier to simply delete their crap than compile, research and file suit.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
I find it works well for starting the fireplace. Just remove the little plastic window from the front of the envelope (you get good at just tearing the front of the envelope off real quick) and burn baby burn! I haven't bought any kindling yet this year. Seriously. It's effective, secure (I don't like throwing away credit card applications, etc.), and very satisfying.
The issue here is one of property rights, not speech rights. Freedom of speech does not cover spamming for the same reason it doesn't cover painting graffiti on people's houses.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Some of you may like this
For a while now, my company has been in "hot pursuit" of spammers. Getting them for the message itself is mostly a grey area legally (the Washington state makes an exception), but using corporate resources without authorization is illegal. So we send them hefty invoices (for relay easily in the $500,000 range) and enforce them worldwide with the help of a collection agency, which adds 48% to the original cost to the spammer (we operate under the assumption that none will pay voluntarily, and all cases go through the full court process).
Currently there are $1.2m pending in courts, 90% in the US, the rest in Japan and Korea. And a vast majority has not even been invoiced (we have spent a ton of money on that already, but it does take time to research proper addresses to serve documents).
The goal is to get a few major judgements against the people who have their goods promoted this way (if we can collect on that, is another issue; and they can see if and how they can collect from the actual spammers). Once that is done, and press releases have been issued, we hope it sends strong enough a signal to spammers and their clients to stop it worldwide.
Any surplus beyond covering our costs will be donated to the EFF. Top EFF lawyers were very helpful in validating the legal approach. We are not looking to make a profit on this.
For more information see:
http://www.meliorinc.com/html/policies.html
[Why? We were shut down once too often by relay, at a time when we had to keep some servers open for special customers]
(I didn't remember my SlashDot login, and the password didn't arrive yet via e-mail - sorry for the "anonymous" sender address)
Thomas J. Ackermann
CEO
Melior, Inc.
i've got a bunch of hotmail addresses i keep to use when i sign up for stuff. some of them haven't been given out yet though, and they still get 10-30 emails a day, all of which are spam.
Free Webmail
Not quite spam, but I remember a month or so ago, that a user billed spammers at the rate of 125$ per hour with a minimum of 10 hours to filter out their email to his/her domain.
Anyways, recently, Radio shack posted my home phone number as one of their local stores. I emailed them a couple weeks to change it and got no response, so I gave them a notice to remove it within 24 hours or I'd bill them the same amount (1250/10hours), to route their phone calls to the correct store.
I went to the store and they also have it listed on their reciepts and said they're having it listed in the phone book. They told me that they shipped in the notice to not print it in the phone book and were working on the reciept prints, but the website was up to corporate, so that's who I'm billing.
They have until 5:32 tonight to change the number on their website or they're getting a daily invoice.
I don't care if it works or not, I'd love the cash, but I'd love even more the phone to stop ringing off the hook, its worse than spam.
btamail.net.cn is indeed a major repeat spammer - this doesn't have anything to do with "all Chinese being clueless", though.
If you go the "Since one machine in China is a major spammer, all Chinese are clueless" route, don't forget to equate the US with AOL, spammers.net and similar resources.
A problem with ISPs in China is that most Chinese people don't speak English (which, again, doesn't mean they're stupid - how many English speaking people speak Chinese?), so dropping the ISP a note saying "your user foo is sending spam" will be as understandable to some of them as spam in Chinese is to you.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
So how do you go about finding their addresses?
Quite a bit of the spam I'm getting spamvertises websites with whois entries along the lines of
You suck, Antispammers invalidaccount@hotmail.com
1, Spam avenue
Spam city
NA 12345
1-900-555-1234
Unfortunately, quite a few registrars don't kick domains for putting in invalid contact information.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
btamail.net.cn is not the only Chinese domain that I receive SPAM from in China. Just the major offender. 90% of all the spam I get originates from China. I have also run open relay checks on IP blocks in China and found most to harbor open relays. So I am not talking about 1 machine.
The problem with Chinese ISPs is not the inability to speak English but the inability to give a damn about the harm they are causing to users in other countries.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Tidbits (a MacOS maillist & web site that happens to be based in Washington state) sued a spammer in 1998. They won in 2000, but by then the spammer had fled across different state lines a dozen times, and you have to file new paperwork every time. They eventually gave up on collecting from him.
The article doesn't specify if Bennett has actually received money yet, or just a judgement. It's quite possible he won't see a dime.
Does anyone have any information on how to persue payment from spammers in states other than Washington? Do any other states have similar laws? I live in Oklahoma and as far as I know, we don't have any such law.
Thanks,
Troy
Spamming should be a capital crime. Seriously, if the penalty for deliberately sending out unsolicited bulk e-mail was death, we would have a lot fewer spammers in this country. Of course sometimes you have the problem where a US-based company spams but uses an offshore spammer to do it. In those cases, long periods of incarceration for knowingly arranging a spamming run would be sufficient, IMO.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
If we considered spamming to be an act of terror (I don't know about you, but I am often terrorified by large ammounts of spam) then it would be perfectly fine to send some B-52s over there and blow the living daylights out of them!
1 I opened a mailbox with a guessable name.
2 Didn't abandon it after 2 years.
That's all it takes is a mailbox that doesn't bounce that isn't a business address like microsoft.com. I joined an ISP when they broke ground and got the easy to remember randy@ on the domain. I guarded the address, but after about 2 years of a clean box, it became discovered and made someones list. Getting on a list is all it takes. Try it. Due to overload it is about impossible to get a randy@msn/yahoo/hotmail etc. box now. Look for a new local ISP in your area and sign up trying to get a guessable box. Don't ever use it, but check it often. Guess what, when the domain gets discovered, the guessable boxes get spammed.
The truth shall set you free!
While it's tempting to mailbomb spammers, it just increases the problem.
It doesn't just boggle down your computer, it also affects your ISP's (innocent) mail server, and all the hosts that happen to be on the route between you and the spammer.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Now I can expect to get a bunch of e-mails with headers like "Make money fast! (WA residents only).... beeblebrox".
Oh, wait. I already do.
Yes and no. Remember that spam is an advertising tool that companies/individuals use to draw you to something. If you live in the U.S., then companies that try to advertise to you will most-likely also be in the U.S. I don't think it matters where the SMTP server that the email bounced off of is, it just matters where the person wanting to advertise to you is.
In most cases, this will be the same country that you live in. We can also assume that Europe will jump on the band wagon and pass similar laws. This leaves 3rd world countries. Now you have to remember that not only do the servers have to be in the 3rd world country, but also the company soliciting also must be in the third world country in order for them to remain immune.
Why aren't we told when editors moderate our posts?
Fight Spammers!
>Martin Palmer, also from Washington state, claims to have collected over $18,000 from spammers, mostly through out-of-court settlements
Getting cash from spammers is good, but wouldn't it be better in the long run to get an actual judgement? Seems like a string of judgements would set some precedents that would help the cause for future cases. Taking cash in exchange to drop the court case might punish the individual spammer in the short run, but I would think getting more $500 judgements on the books would be far more damaging.
Spammers wouldn't spam if it didn't work! If no one replied to spam, there wouldn't be any money in spamming, therefore no more spam. Let the marketplace take care of spam instead of trying to pass nebulous laws with great potential for abuse.
when it said "MAKE MONEY FAST" :^)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
A golden humor opportunity thrown away.
Yes, you're absolutely right, it makes perfect sense that I should aquiesce to receiving a couple of thousand of pieces of junk mail each year so that I can save 34 cents every few months.
You seem to miss the point: the only reason that companies send out junk mail is that they can make more money by doing it. If their costs go up, junk mail will be less effective. If you don't buy stuff from junk-mail solicitations, their response rate goes down.
If you're worried about how everyone gets hurt in the long run, go look up the amount of money spent on marketing this year. Imagine how much cheaper your purchases would be if you bought them because they were the best you could find, rather than because you fell for a piece of junk mail.
So how do you go about finding their addresses?
Follow the money. 99% of spams are trying to get money from you; they need a way for you to get them the money.
If they have a web site, a court can compel the ISP to cough up their payment details. Ditto for an 800 number. And if they're using a PO box, you can get the details yourself; according to postal regulations, they're required to give out the true name and address of anybody using a PO box to do business with the public.
I have set up some spam filters for it, and they generally work very well. Here is my script for removing SPAM - it hasb't caught a bogus one yet:
filter spam or
subject "Cat"
to "unlisted"
to "undisclosed"
from "WeatherBug"
subject "Animals"
body "Nigeria"
body "Virtumundo"
subject "Casino"
subject "Payout"
subject "win"
subject "won"
subject "free"
subject "back"
subject "SaveBig"
subject "Breast"
subject "Natural"
subject "Rates"
subject "teen"
subject "lesbian"
subject "sex"
body "teen"
body "sex"
body "lesbian"
body "Merchant"
subject "Money"
subject "mortgage"
subject "loan"
subject "irs"
from "Cyberworld"
subject "$"
from "Dialpad"
subject "DVD"
subject "Debt"
subject "Judgement"
subject "Dollar"
from "email.ro"
subject "%"
to "Valued"
to ".ru"
from ".ru"
to "$"
from ".ar"
to ".ar"
action move SPAM
Anyways, have fun all.
So, perhaps you could say that I asked for it. I get about 10 spams a day.
But, there is nothing more irritating to surf pages and there is no contact information when you need to contact the publisher if you've got comments.
I'm not going to let spammers dictate that I can't let people send me their questions, thus making the internet less useful for everyone. The spammers are not going to win.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
The big disappointment is their non-free email proxy. Requires too much manual intervention, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. What I'd give for a simple "prove that you're not a spambot before you send to this address" filter!
I don't know if many people do respond to spam. My suspicion is that a lot of spam is from first-time, single offenders. After they see they didn't get any business, and get smacked down by their ISP, you have an ex-spammer. The problem is that there are a hundred morons waiting to fill their shoes - the supply of first-time spammers is endless. The repeat offenders in the spam game are spamware vendors and spam-friendly ISPs.
History has also proven that we can't trust people to do what is best for themselves and society. If everyone did the right thing in terms of 'voting with their dollars' we wouldn't need laws against confidence games and fraud. The fact is, there are a lot of gullible people who are looking for a free lunch, who will probably be taken for some money by a scam artist. It's no different from spam - you can't count on everyone using their best judgment.
Not to knock your data, I must say that it's commonly recognized that 70% of the spam actually comes from the US. Much of most people see as foreign (to the US) spam doesn't actually originate from there. It's usually a US-based spammer like Alan Ralsky with a US ISP relaying spam through a foreign open relay. This is really really common. In fact almost all of the Ralsky spam I've received lately originated froma Broadwing.net dialup (a known spam supporting ISP: BLOCK THEM!) and was sent through a foreign open relay. Hell I've even seen Ralsky abuse a NASA owned open relay. This isn't to say that foreign countries don't spam. Many people have great luck in filtering on TLDs or netblocks of foreign countries. I've heard of people filtering all of China's netblocks, as well as the .cn, .tw, .jp, .ar, .br, and more tlds and having little foreign spam left in their inbox. I can't justify doing that at a provider level but I can justify recommending it to individuals that never correspond with people in those countries. Give it a try sometime and see how you like it. Use the procmail 'clone' bit to test it.
What does $5000 per day mean? Per day I receive spam? The Tennessee spam law reads:
(2) If the injury arises from the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail, the injured person, other than an electronic mail service provider, may also recover attorneys' fees and costs, and may elect, in lieu of actual damages, to recover the lesser of ten dollars ($10.00) for each and every unsolicited bulk electronic mail message transmitted in violation of this section, or five thousand dollars ($5,000) per day. The injured person shall not have a cause of action against the electronic mail service provider that merely transmitted the unsolicited bulk electronic mail over its computer network.
Suing spammers is one thing. It'd also be nice to sue ISPs that neglect to enforce their AUP.
I am one of a handful of people actively pursuing spammers in Washington. I am vice-president of a Seattle ISP and when I get bored on the weekends, I scan the Qmail alias file, which is 99% double-bounced spam. Under RCW 19.190, almost every one of these is illegal as the spammer "misrepresented the point of origin" of the email.
I pick out the easy spams -- ones with phone numbers, fax numbers or physical addresses -- and I contact the spammer and say, "look, we got illegal email from you and we're willing to overlook it if it doesn't happen again." A fair number of spammers then remove all of our domains from their lists. The ones that don't get a few reminders, then a notice of small claim. Under Washington law, ISPs can sue for $1,000 per email.
Check out my lawsuit page for some info. For those non-Washingtonians, you can get in on some of the lawsuit fun by suing junk faxers and telemarketers under federal law, which I've tried just to see if it works. The good news: it does.
Us folks in Washington State have a great deal of cooperation going on via mailing lists. We're gearing up for some serious spammer suing. And it is hard to collect, but it's not impossible. Once you get a dozen cases going, the money from one case isn't a big deal so you just send it to collections to fuck with the spammer.
Essentially, this is just a real fun hobby that happens to pay a bit of money. Oh, you might find this interesting: Zen and the Art of Small Claims.
Now, we get to the interesting stuff - how would you get all your participants?
That's the point of class action lawsuits: You don't need to find participants, you only need one 'victim' and the court's permission to go forward with the suit. After the trial is over, the judge awards damages per victim, and then you post notices to rally them.
The problem of course is that a class action lawsuit can be brought for specific actions, therefore you could not sue "The Spammers" collectively. You'd have to initiate one action per spammer company.
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
Get your own back from SPAMMERS! Click the link and follow through to each of the SPAMMER's advertisments you wish to 'pay back' for their fine services. The cost to the SPAMMERS per click is displayed next to each advertisment. Only one click per day per person per advertisement is counted... http://www.overture.com/d/search/?type=home&Keywor ds=bulk+email
That way, each company would have to sign the message digest of the message with their private key, and you could validate sender by verifying the signature.
Purdy dern simple, if the Fed would just quit seeing crypto as a weapon.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Ok, so Hotmail is owned by a Washington state corporation, right? Assuming that the mail servers (and hence the final destination of the messages) are located in Washington, could I file for violations of that state's law on all of the spam I get to my hotmail account? IANAL, but if my mail all ends up in that state, wouldn't I be protected by that state's consumer protection laws?
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
My uncle used to do that only he would sometimes tape a brick to the envelope. Magazine advertisers used to send punch cards that you were supposed to punch out if you were responding to an offer. He always punched holes randomly before sending them back. He got a free subscription to some gardening magazine once.
Untrue. Damn untrue.
The USPS started doing a study of that, some years back. The DMA got huffy about it and ran to Congress, who promptly passed a law forbidding the USPS from actually making an accurate study of which class of mail subsidizes which other classes.
I don't know why the DMA would be covering that up, unless they were worried that a 2001 1st-class stamp would be a quarter if they weren't around. If you can think of a perfectly innocent reason for them to seek a legally-mandated coverup, I'd like to know what it is.
IANAL... but this looks very similar to the "where do I owe taxes" question. Basically, with online purchases, you owe sales tax in the state where your ass is. I would expect the ass doctrine to apply to spam law as well.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Well, I guess that depends on how it's delivered. Where I live, the posting of flyers (usually with tape or thumbtacks) on maiolposts is consiudered littering, and yoiu can file a complaiant with the local PD. They generally contact and cite the violator, who generally is some small company that paid some kids to deliver a bunch of fliers. Actually putting them in a mailbox is a federal offense, AIR, but I would think postal inspectors have better things to do than chase down small business owners.
You may not get any cash, but if enough peopel file complaints the littering stops.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Whatever your opinion of using government regulation of E-mail to stop spam, I hope that most of you will come out in opposition to the idea that the individual states should be doing so.
This has to be opposed on the general principle of the thing. Individual states should not be making any rules about E-mail. It doesn't matter if the rules support motherhood and condemn terrorists. It's a jurisdictional issue, and the laws are unconstitutional.
The reason is that for a large fraction of E-mails, the sender has no idea what state the recipient is in. If we let the states regulate E-mail "into the state" then we create a duty on every E-mailer to know what state they are mailing, and become aware of the E-mail laws of that state and obey them.
This means that if I, in California, send an E-mail to somebody who happens to be in Oregon (though I don't know that directly) that I must check to see that they are not in Washington. But Washington has, under the constitution, no power to put any requirements on people mailing from California to Oregon, nor should they have such power.
Consider: New Mexico passed laws restricting indecent material on the net. Are you now ready to be aware of that, and to check every E-mail you send to make sure it's not going to New Mexico or is not indecent by their standards? And check 49 other states while you're at it.
It would be a zoo.
Now, I'm not really keen on any government regulation of E-mail, but if it is to exist, it should only be federal.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
you can find ways to fight spam here
http://www.lenny.com/spam/
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!