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Lawsuits Against Spammers
apc writes "Pretty good overview of the state of the law
regarding spammers, and some stories about people who have sued them and won. Nice to see the topic getting mainstream attention."
It talks about several different states and several different people who
have won cases. I still think its fairly hopeless, but I also believe forging
SMTP headers should be legally punishable by castration.
Instead of encouraging litigation, why don't we develop (easy) and attempt to gain acceptance (harder) of an authenticated e-mail format?
I would much rather see technical (or social) solutions to the spam problem... laws have a funny way of not going in our favor, don't they?
What we need is national legislation against spam. There are too many state laws that legitimize spam in one way or another. This gives every spammer a one time get out of jail free card, and does nothing for spam problem in general. New spammers pop up all the time - it doesn't make sense to 'opt out' of every new spam list you get onto.
The article makes a good point about laws that require spam to be labeled. This isn't a solution, and there are also conflicting requirements between state laws. One law requires "ADV: ADLT" on the subject header, another law requires "ADULT ADVERTISEMENT". This is a perfect example of laws being too specific - legislation has no business dictating changes to the SMTP protocol. This isn't useful either: shouldn't spam laws apply to more than SMTP? Say, ICQ spam? Internal AOL spam?
This is why we need a national spam law. No conflicts, no SMTP requirements, no opt-out. Make spam illegal, period. Spam is harassment, theft of service, and usually fraudulent. It costs ISPs millions of dollars that are passed on to YOU. Companies lose productivity because of workers receiving spam.
If you think this is any different from junk fax laws, you're kidding yourself. Spam and junk faxes both hurt the recipient. Spam is not free speech. Spam is not a constitutional right. Banning spam IS the right answer.
U.S. businesses generally oppose restrictions, equating advertising with free speech.
"If you ban me from this type of medium, you have severely limited my ability to enter into the marketplace," said Jerry Cerasale of the Direct Marketing Association.
God DAMN IT, for the LAST time, spam is not a free speech issue, it's a property rights issue. My computer is NOT a public utility for every sleazy marketing dink in the world to use at MY expense.
If Mr. Cerasleazy wants to "enter the marketplace", he can damn well pay for his advertising.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Many of these spammers send from hotmail.com or from email addresses that are not in the US. So how would I go about suing them? Even assuming that I could sue them, how could I manage to go about collecting my settlement from them?
I'm afraid suing is not the answer to ending all spam, just a small class of spam.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
YES! Most times that I get spam, I trace down the headers to find the source and report the spam to the ISP hosting the address, and the spam stops.
MOST times. It took a while to get through to hinet.net about their 'tom lee designs' spammer, but even then, when I finally got through to somebody the spam was stopped.
For the last three months, I've been dealing with wads of spam from what I believe to be the same spammer due to the headers:
The ISP in question is AT&T Global. (mail to abuse@prserv.net ends up at postmaster@attglobal). For the last three months or so, I've diligently forwarding the messages, with headers, to abuse@prserv.net (or postmaster@attglobal.net). Until recently, they've been universally coming back with form-letters saying 'this problem has already been reported'. Sometimes the spam stops for a day or two, sometimes it doesn't.
I even looked up their contact number on whois and called THAT a few times (the only human beings there seem to be overworked and underpaid tech support people). The last few days, I've been getting my reports returned in a form letter stamped 'not our domain', as if whoever's getting my messages at AT&T Global is either 'in on it' or just doesn't want to deal with it any more (or perhaps is's just a 'new guy' who's not used to dealing with the headers, or thinks that only AT&T Global user's complaints about spam from their network should be dealt with)....
Point is, with roughly 80 spam messages from the same spammer forwarded, the spam has continued unabated, and I honestly wonder if some salesdrone at AT&T Global's Austin, Texas area POP has an 'understanding' with the spammer and has been willing to re-sign him every time he gets kicked off. Unfortunately, none of the emails I've sent to 'postmaster@attglobal.net' requesting more information about the spammer (including requests on the order of 'who do I contact to find out the proper legal procedure for obtaining the spammer's identity so that I can look into taking action myself') simply come back with more form-letters, or are unanswered...
I called them again today (after last night's two spams came back from them stamped 'not our domain') and for the first time, actually got to speak to someone in the postmaster department. She actually seemed helpful and polite, so hopefully something might finally be DONE about this spammer...
So, anyway, to get back to the point - the ISP's are the ones who have the power to do something about spammers on their network, and if they choose not to, there ought to be some sort of recourse. Small ISP's, you can complain to their upstream provider, but when you're dealing with AT&T Global?....
'scuze the verbosity of this post - this particular spammer/ISP issue has me pretty irritated at the moment...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I think companies like MSN/Microsoft/Hotmail, yahoo, excite and @home should be doing the suing.
Everytime someone forges an e-mail address using their domain name, and someone forwards it to abuse@something.com then it costs them money to research it. It could also be considered slander if someone sends you an e-mail from something like animalsex@microsoft.com.
Don't they care about their PR? I mean now I think that Microsoft has something to do with bestiality. How do I know that it wasn't really from them?? I'll just keep assuming that till proven otherwise.