Class Action Lawsuit Against Spammer

sfjoe writes "California-based spammer eTracks is being sued by the law firm, Morrison and Foerster (who have a very cool homepage). M & F's press release says they are "...seeking other relief, including attorneys' fees and statutorily authorized damages of $50 for each email delivered in violation of the law, up to $25,000 per day". California's anti-spam law has already held up under appeals court scrutiny so this may very well be a major setback to the spam industry." I think spammers should be forced to pay by donating an organ for each forged header.

Comments

Re:what gives?

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Why in the world should it be illegal?

How about because spammers take up network resources and user time without being asked to, without being authorized to, and without yielding benefit? It costs a spammer essentially nothing to send an email that will consume perhaps thousands of dollars in lost bandwidth, CPU cycles, and user effort. The cost is not borne by the instigator, but by the unwilling recipient.

Let's say I decided to drop by your house every day and scrawl an ad (or an offensive message) in chalk on the sidewalk. It's easy enough to erase -- just a little water spilled over it. Is it OK, then? What if I decided to do this every day to every house in your neighborhood? What if I got the chalk by, say, dropping by the local public school and absconding with it?

And I don't know what a good anti-spam law would be, but I wish to death that people would stop acting as if it were a priori impossible to write one without somehow opening up all imaginable governmental ills. Good laws do exist, though it's fashionable on slashdot to pretend they don't. A targetted law helping to assign some economic cost to sending spam would help restore the operation of normal market forces. Not all slopes are slippery.

Re:what gives?

[Marasmus]

Here's the quick and dirty as to why many of the slashdot community have a violent hatred toward spammers: We run mail servers.

I run vectorstar.net, a free hosting service. I would easily wager that greater than 90% of the mail that wriggles through to our users is spam. Thus, 90% of my mail-related disk space and 90% of my mail server processing goes to handling unwanted, unnecessary spam. That's the difference between being able to run a Pentium 100 server or a PIII-1ghz server. Thus, it costs me a LOT of money to deal with spam mail.

The same situation falls true for the majority of businesses. Their mail servers handle far more spam than they do valid email. It leads to serious expenditures on mail server hardware, (in some companies) software, and staff to maintain the servers.

So that's why we hate spam with a passion. :)

Re:what gives?

[lblack]

Spam has rendered my hotmail address absolutely useless. I've had that address for around 4.5 years, now. It was a nice address. It was easy to remember, because it was my name@hotmail.com. No numbers, no funky underscoring, banging, etc. It was simple, elegant, and nobody ever forgot it. (My name@biggest free e-mail provider.com).

Now, however, I receive about 20 spam a day to that address. I miss messages that I should be receiving. After going two months while travelling without internet access, I returned to discover nothing *but* spam in my inbox -- hotmail had automatically deleted the older messages on the assumption that I would want to keep the newer ones.

Now, my hotmail block-list is full, and I have about another 200 addresses I would like to add to it. I cannot use that account, because it is now fundamentally useless. And spammers don't cost me money?

Spammers cost money everytime they send an ad that a distracted person clicks on, and gets shipped off to a porn site. That red-flags the corporate internet policy manager or whoever, who has to then go TALK to that employee about their going to a porn site. Sure, they just show the spam and say "Oops". It costs both of those people at least half an hour, though, and at $100 an hour, that's an expensive piece of e-mail.

The bandwidth used is not inconsiderable, either, particularly for people who are using dial-up accounts in regions where they pay-by-minute.

Spam is hardly a victimless crime, it's just a stupid one, and it's all opportunity or possible cost, so it's hard to really say "oh, that cost us money". It definitely costs money. It cost me my fucking hotmail account, and discarded my lengthy correspondence with folk hero Donovan, for Chrissakes.

Bah.
l