Slashdot Mirror
When Spammers Try To Sue You
An Anonymous Coward writes: "I was looking for information about what recourse there is against spammers when I came across this site. It appears that Bernard Shifman sent email to several people trying to solcit employment via spam, and when they replied to him, asking him to stop, and reporting the spam to his ISP he threatend them with a lawsuit. It's a very entertaining read."
I'm still waiting for a subpoena from back in December 99 from some guy threatening to sue some people on alt.cult-movies.rocky-horror for "slander" (guy claimed to be a software patent lawyer and didn't even know the difference between "slander" and "libel"... it was classic) because we made him lose money on e-bay, as we pointed out that his so called "Super Rare" (which, since then, has become blaspheme on the Rocky Horror newsgroup... but mostly because me and a Frank-N-Furter from Vegas spammed the board one night with a plethora of jokes about "Suck my super-rare schlong" and the like...) Rocky Horror Dolls he was selling on e-bay for $80 were available at your local Spencer's gifts for about $16....
This is just another case of someone threatening with lawsuits when they're really just full of chicken$#!+. Come on. Who here hasn't been threatened with legal action by some moron online?
I still say the coolest part of that whole flame war (which, btw, lasted a good month) was that he kept giving us phone numbers for the Pittsburg department of investigations (being that I'm Canadian, it would've been quite impressive that someone whose jurisdiction I'm not even in the same country as would be investigating me) saying that it was his proof that he was going to see us in court. And then he called us evil viscious [sic] morons.
"Come to think of it, there already are a million monkeys at a million typewriters, and usenet is _NOTHING_ like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton.
Karma: Non-Heinous
When you have a publically accessible medium of communication you are implicitly agreeing that anyone may attempt to contact you at least once.
I disagree. How many business companies are there in the world ? If all of them send you an email for advertising, will you take the time to unsuscribe a few million times ? And if they are really nasty, they can even make the unsubscribe process a bit complicated or long.
So the basic question to ask is not who can send you an email but how did they get your email ?. It's a matter of privacy. If you give your email to one company, they should be prevented by law to give or sell your private records except if you authorize it.
Furthermore, you should have the right to see and edit your records for any company that have anything about you. I don't know for the US but, in Belgium, that's the way it works and I am happy with it.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Forget the law, I think we can eliminate most SPAM very simply with as small change to current technology I've outlined before:
"I can't figure out who to open a discussion with about this, but I have this simple idea that should at least eliminate the anonymous/spoofed spam, which is all I get.
You simply modify the mail servers to query the sending server whether a received mail actually came from that server. The query is a key based on the contents of the message and a key included with the message, which is itself based on the same contents and a private key of the sending server. If the sending server has been upgraded with this feature, it can validate, or not, the message. If it's not validated, the message is bounced. For backwards compatibility, if the sending server hasn't been upgraded, the message always goes through. [Here's the beauty of the idea:] But as more servers are upgraded, fewer and fewer servers will be able to be used as scapegoats for spoofed spam, and pressure will mount to upgrade these servers as well.
Eventually, the only spam you will get will be from a valid return address, which can be handled more effectively in more conventional ways. In fact, adding manual bouncing at this stage might be helpful as well, since now it really will bounce back to the sender.
I realize I've glossed over some details here, and someone much more experienced in mail servers will have to massage this approach to make it practical, but I think the germ of a very simple but effective idea is here."
Xesdeeni