Dutch Anti-Spam Ruling Nullified on Appeal

dex@ruunat writes: "Today, the Amsterdam court nullified an earlier ruling by a lower judge that that spam outfit AbFab is forbidden to send spam to customers of the Dutch ISP XS4all. According to the XS4all website (Dutch only), the judge ruled that spam doesn't cause very much inconvenience, and that people who want to get rid of it can easily change their email address. XS4all considers appealing to the Dutch high court. There's one other ray of hope though: in 15 months, the new European spam directive will come into force, effectively outlawing all spam." A prize of zero dollars to the reader who can suggest the translation engine which does the best job with Dutch :)

Comments

Change your E-mail address

[hackwrench]

Yeah, right, so I change my e-mail address, then I have to tell everyone I actually want to contact me what the new e-mail address is, then they have to actually remember that I am at the new e-mail address (or update their database, address book or whatever on me), then when the spammers find me at the new e-mail address, the whole thing repeats all over again. Meanwhile, the ISP is getting spam trying to get sent to the abandoned e-mail addresses... Would the judge feel the same way if this were a phone number we were talking about here?

Re:Suspension of anti-spammer activities

[anthony_dipierro]

I think that for a one month period, sometime this year, all anti-spammers and ISP's around the globe should suspend any activities that they are currently undertaking to supress spam.

If we could get all anti-spammers and ISPs around the globe to work together, we'd have implemented a new protocol which eliminates spam by now.