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California Anti-Spam Law Approved
Metroid72 writes "Zdnet reports that "A California anti-spam bill passed the Senate on Wednesday, a first step toward the passage of a law that would give people the right to sue spammers." I guess there's light at the end of the tunnel"
I wonder how Hormel feels about all of this Anti-Spam sentiment.
IIRC, this sort of law exists in a few other states. How simple is it to actually use? Does the spammer have to be in California? Do I need to be able to locate the spammer?
I have Mozilla 1.3 with built in spam filters!
I'll quit my job and rake in easy money by suing spammers. If you'd like to know how you too can do this, send $5 to...
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
$500/spam? Yeah! I'm rich!
just in time to save us from unemployment claims running out and having to find a real job! small claims court, here i come...
Find a spammer, heck, in the time it would take you to do that you could go out and find 500 bucks on the street.
Banaaaana!
Yes but it's waaaay over there, very tiny. Just a speck.
Until something like this gets approved at the federal level, at least.
And I know that won't do much good for overseas spammers and so on, but perhaps it will increase the cost of doing business.
In those case, we can only hope that other countries will do the same. China and Korea, especially.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
No lawyer will sue for something piddly like $500. What we need is for someone to set up a service that we can forward all our spam to. It will root out the sender and lump all violations against one sender together. Then, the guy gets sued to hell and back. We all get our $300/ea ($500 less 40% legal fees) and everyone is happy.
I don't think this is going to solve spaming. (You can fake your email, etc.) It will only add to the people who sue everything.
... has been e-mailed to every California taxpayer.
Sigs are bad for your health.
What use is the ability to sue spammers when you dont know who they are or where they live. Sure, The Spamhaus ROSKO Project will give some details on the big players, but chances are they already have their operation sorted out 'legally' offshore already.
No, this is by definition a technology issue, and must be solved by technology. Trusted servers, trusted users, accountability, e-stamps, etc.
We just don't need more useless laws filling up the books, law enforcement time and money, and user harrassment.
But I will admit one thing, if ever I expected a useless law to come from anywhere, they left coast is the place.
is just a frieght train coming your way....
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I have no love for spam but it did yield me a great email from: grow@yourmember.big. Its almost postmodernly weird.
Before we cheer legal solutions (which will have their fair share of downsides) maybe more people should take technological measures.
Also have a look here: Annoying spammers with OpenBSD's pf
Slides explaining how Bayesian email filtering is successful
PS: I know people might say, but what about the economic cost of spam, blah blah blah. Read the slides. If no one ever gets spam, people will stop sending it, and the economic cost goes away.
Good luck!
jabber: johnynek@jabber.org
... So now I get my university diploma, and my first check with it?
Individuals don't have to see the negative side of spam, if they use something like Mozilla's spam filtering, or any of the unix MTA plugins. A defendant is likely to ask, "well, why didn't you use an anti-spam tool?" which would be a very good argument, at least in front of a jury.
I expect that businesses will be able to prove their case much more effectively, having to deal with millions of spam messages over very short periods of time. It's much easier for a business to prove damages, what with server and monitor logs.
What's this Submit thingy do?
I've just read the terrible news on CNN Law Center - Bill Gates was murdered in Los Angeles today. Truly an American icon.
Strangely enough none of the Peace movement organizations have spammed me. Perhaps even more stange, or suggestive, is that all of the peace groups are non profit, while all the pro war psam seems to come from some business hoping to sell some thing or another (offensive t-shirts, duct tape, plastic sheeting, etc).
I wonder if slashdot will ever be home to trials concerning peoples abuses of the right to post comments. What kind of jibberish is this. But, seriously spam is terrible in both forms so...
I now fully expect people to begin holding a trial against me for my stupidity. Dang it!
Email a copy of this article to all of your friends--and tell them to do the same!
At Bilkum and Screwum, we specialize in spams cases. Don't delay! Call 1-800-SPAM-EQUALS-BUCKS. Our trained attack lawyers are standing by.
Sigs are bad for your health.
I don't know much about the laws regaurding fraud and other illegal activities done "through" a foreign country. I was under the impression that it was still prossicutable to "launder" money by way of an out-of-country bank account. Is there any reason why relaying spam or running a spam engine from offshore would be legal for a US resident?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
There is still the problem of tracing the spammer. Even if they're found guilty, what'll happen if they don't pay the fine? Will we send the spammer to a collection agency? Will we send the Mafia after them? C'mon. Why don't we just pass a law fining all ISP's with open relays? This "anti-spam" law sounds as effective as putting a Band-Aid on a compound fracture. Why don't we start a new anti-spam political campaign: "Just say NO to spam!" Define a new email protocol. Elliminate SMTP. Done. If you miss some email because the sender doesn't speak the new protocol, well...too bad for them. Sheesh.
rob
Israel is not hostile foreign country and your website is pure racism and antisemitsm.
What happens when someone like me, or a website postmaster, is the one to sue? Or even better, a major ISP systems administrator?
Can an ISP use this to sue?
Imagine an enormous ISP honeypot, all routed to one person, and then that person sues the same spammer again and again, each time making a $500 dent.
Would this make any difference?
Cheers, Joel The ISP is (in a sense) receiving the spam. since the ISP is indeed receiving the spam?
SB 342, "Unsolicited email advertisements" (Florez)
SB 186, "Privacy: unsolicited e-mail advertising" (Murray)
SB 12, "Electronic Mail Advertising" (Bowen)
AB 567, "Unsolicited electronic mail advertisements" (Simitian)
For those about to rejoice, remember this is simply the first step. It still has to finish going through the state assembly, and then get signed by Governor Davis. Let's get some of this stuff pushed through for the better of the anti-spam community, shall we?
This sig no verb.
A recent report on spam by Reuters stated that Yugoslavia, in an attempt to bring in more revenue is "harboring" spammers through its new program in which the government sells mass emailing licenses to spammers. These licenses basically exempt these spammers from any kind of criminal prosecution.
While this article is good news, it will not stop the constant migration of spamming operations to foreign countries who need the money.
There have been more and more people moving towards a newer solution which is very simple. Just ignore the spam. If more and more people ignore the unsolicited emails, eventually the Spammers will lose revenue or lose interest. By establishing all these forceful "spam attacks" we are just flaming the fire and provoking more spam. This is exactly the kind of media attention these spammers thrive on.
my two cents
With the junkfax laws, one may go after the junkfaxer (entity that sent the fax) and/or the entity on who's behalf the fax was sent. that has been proven in many cases where the fax entity could not be identified or was an offshore (often Canada) service. If your local carpet cleaning service pays a junk fax service to send the ads, then you can sue them directly. If they want to suggest they didn't do anything wrong, then just have them identify the people that sent the ads and simply add them as a defendant and let them fight it out.
Some cases will be more tough to prove, but with a little case law, you can win. One difficult case would be something like mortgage lead spams. The spammer and website are offshore, and once they have your information, then they sell the leads to numerous companies that 'claim' to not know how the information was obtained, however this will not be a valid excuse. I haven't seen the text of the bill (will a karma whore please post it if found), but I hope the wording is like that of the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991). In order to be sent a prerecorded commercial message or commercial fax, one must have a prior business relationship or have given prior *express* permission to receive such. Express permission cannot be sold nor purchased. Those of us that run our own email servers or use catch-all domain forwarding or other such service will be able to track all emails quite easily where you can simply create a new account for every location you post, web site registration, sweepstakes entry, etc so that you can decidedly trace the method a company used to obtain your address. A company trying to suggest that you must have 'subscribed or requested at some point to be added' will be shot down faster than my advances on prom night.
You don't have to worry about stopping the spammers per se, but the people that are knowingly paying others to send the illicit ads. The spammers protect themselves decently well just like junk faxers and scamming telemarketers, but when you hit their source of money, then you cut the body off the head of the snake. If the business think they were unfairly treated, then they are free to go after the spammers they paid to send the junk. States can pass all the bills they want, but until the public has rights to collect damages that have been made themselves, such laws or bills will continue to be toothless. Washington's law, from what I understand, has been decently effective. I simply do not see how Congress can site idly much longer on this issue. This is something that is affecting more people than before. The junk fax problem was quite so widespread when Congress acted in the early 1990s. Senator Disney did well with the TCPA, so maybe an anti-spam bill would be considered someday. It would see the best time to pass this is on the heels of the implementation of the FTC/FCC regulations. Awareness will be at an all time high and the same arguments DMA, Fax.com, and other scum will try to usee will have already been shot down with fresh case law or interpretation of regulations. While some people get in the news for winning spam cases using the TCPA, it seems most of those involved default judgments (like the recent Sears case). I know this isn't an junk email list, but thought some would be interested in the obvious mirroring of aspects of the TCPA. Interesting aspect is also the additional penalty 'read: tax' going to state coffers, that will be included even if it is a private action.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Shut up, bloody Vikings!
Sigs are bad for your health.
B: kill them
C: hunt them down with intellegent S&D droids with lazer guided missiles?
Still, I seriously wonder if the ability to sue them for spamming will really stop them... I mean, they can probably find good ways to stay very anonymous.
But this probably does screw over all the big spamlords.
Could be a whole new employement niche, Spam Collection Agent.
"Hello, you bad old spammer you, I'm here to tow away your server."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Three laws have been in effect in California since 1998. They've not been widely used, but about a dozen cases that I know about have resulted in positive results for the prosecutors. You can follow current cases on the Suespammers discussion list, or read the archives.
The new law appears to be more protectionist than previous ones, which required either (a) opt-out by the recipient, (b) status as an ISP, or (c) evidence of fraud.
--Tom Geller
Founder, SpamCon Foundation
Tom Geller
While I find spam as annoying as the next person, when would there ever be a case where you could justify some sort of damages equal to the financial sum of $500?
Maybe I'm just being ignorant here, but I really don't see spam as the problem that a lot of people make it out to be. Can someone enlighten me on any real problems that spam causes and who is actually effected by it?
Bases on the information I have, I see this law as more useless legislation that people should not be paying taxes to fund.
However, this seems amusingly similar to the evolutions of spellings that led to 1337 5p34k. IRC would filter out some words like "hacker" and disguising these words with numbers and intentional misspellings was a way to get past the filters and avoid breaks in communications. They're using our own cleverness against us. :)
I'm hoping this law was written for AOL and other ISPs verus the end-user. One, I don't have time to sue spammers, B) Other then losing some time and be annoyed I'm not loosing the kind of money that the ISPs are trying to fight it and pay for the bandwith used to transfer it.
It also makes logical sense for AOL or MSN that has huge database of the servers that sent the mail, and the number of people affected.
If such a law is drafted it should make sure that the end user ends up getting price breaks, or refund checks. Also, it should have some realism to it. 250 and email times 1000s of emails is so high that no one can really pay it. Also, things like not being able to renew your drivers license
really drive the point home. This people are not doing this accidently.
If I have 10 accounts at yahoo for example, and I get the mail at all my accounts, will it be $500x10??? What if I have 1000??? I'm going to quit my job, and start opening mail accounts... =)
Existing law prohibits a person or entity conducting business in the state from e-mailing or causing to be e-mailed documents ...
This bill would remove delete these provisions and would instead prohibit the sending, as defined, of a person or entity from initiating an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisements advertisement either from California or to a California electronic mail address. The bill would provide that if any part of these provisions or their application are held invalid, the invalidity shall not effect the other provisions or applications that can still be given effect. The bill would also make it unlawful for a person to sell or provide a list of e-mail addresses to be used to initiate the transmission of unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisements from California or to a California e-mail address. (The strikethroughs did not come through, but you can see them on the ammended bill at the link above).
So it looks like you can sue someone who spams you from outside CA, but who knows if it will be possible to actually recover the damages.
d) Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or restrict the rights of an electronic mail service provider under Section 230(c)(1) of Title 47 of the United States Code, or any decision of an electronic mail service provider to permit or to restrict access to or use of its system, or any exercise of its editorial function.
This doesn't look like such a good idea to me. It seems to limit the liability of an ISP. They could conceivably say, "We didn't acutally send it. Someone else sent it using our server."
There was a thread a couple of weeks ago where MS was supporting a law that will exempt ISPs from monetary penalties. Washington's current setup holds the ISP liable as well (which is how it should be). It would be nice if more states did that, especially since ISPs have legit operational facilities in the states in which they do business. This makes it easy to go after the ISP, which of course motivates them to stop the spam from coming through.
California Anti-Spam Law Approved ... A California anti-spam bill passed the Senate on Wednesday, a first step toward the passage of a law...
So, if it's just a first step, then it isn't really approved then, eh? (All the same, I hope that it is signed by the governor and put into law)
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
This is totally off the cuff but...
It seems society may be taking the wrong approach to this whole spam thing. We keep focussing on the guy actually sending us the e-mail. We seem to be overlooking the fact that there is someone out there who is trying to sell something to us (or scam us). If it weren't for this seller/scammer the spammer would have no reason to send us anything. Instead of attacking the spammer why not attack the root of the problem: the guy who is paying the spammer to spam. The way I look at it the spammer isn't doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He's doing it on someone's behalf because they are paying him. The person doing the selling is likely much more accessable than the actual spammer because one would need to actually contact them to buy the product being advertised. In contrast to suing the spammer why has suing the company/person who has hired the spammer been cosidered?
Never disturb your enemy while he is busy making a mistake.
http://law.spamcon.org/us-laws/states/tn/47-18.sht ml the plot thickens...
http://www.spamlaws.com/state/tn.html
47-18-1604. Penalty.
A civil penalty in the amount of not less than one hundred dollars ($100) nor more than five hundred dollars ($500) may be assessed by the appropriate regulatory agency against any person who initiates any facsimile or e-mail message to a recipient who has previously notified the initiator, in accordance with 47-18-2501(b) and (c), clearly indicating that the recipient does not want to receive any further unsolicited facsimile or e-mail messages from the initiator. All such funds collected shall be deposited in the State General Fund.
Apparently the Tennesse legislature has removed the individual from the equation and substituted the STATE as the beneficiary of any suits against spammers. Who needs to be killed now? Somehow and some where the aforementioned RIGHTS of the consumer have been compromised. Shall we now take up arms against DOMESTIC enemies? Seems like it...
Denial of service is the intent of spammers, and they are stealing property(TIME and MONEY).
Prosecute them on facts, not violating the constitution. This law will be overturned. It is a poorly-built law. It is repungnant to the Constitution of the State of California.
Forget sending/receiving email; regress back to the days of the Pony Express.
rob
It might be pure coincidence but I got like 100% more spam today in my yahoo account - someone venting thier frsutration?
Due to funding, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
law that would give people the right to sue spammers.
Hmm...last I checked, governments could not grant rights--they could only choose whether or not to recognize rights that already existed.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Who knew capitalization was so important outside an English class? From the official SPAM site:
"We oppose the act of "spamming" or sending unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). We have never engaged in this practice, although we have been victimized by it. If you have been one of those who has received UCE with a return address using our website address of SPAM.com, it wasn't us. It's easy and commonplace for somebody sending UCE to simply adopt a fake header ID, which disguises the true source of the UCE and makes it appear that it is coming from someone else. If you have or do receive UCE with this header ID, please understand that it didn't come from us."
...for California to simply enforce the ADV:-at-the-beginning-of-the-subject-line law rather than create a whole slew of new spam laws? If the state did this, then users could just create mail rules to send those ADV: messages straight to the trash. Voila! No spam in your inbox.
Meanwhile, a new legal framework will be put in place in the UK and across Europe to make the sending of spam illegal. Please read the article on BBC Online.
Unselfish actions pay back better
Curiously enough 99.9999% of spam i recieve is USA related, wether its a porn site, antivirus,pills etc etc it always seems to involve someone from the USA
maybe its a social problem more than a technological one, i dont recieve spam from other countries, and the only spam from china i get is from a USA company/individual using an open chinese relay
maybe the law needs to target the promoted product based on the owners/ceo's passport not where the business name is located
cheers
S.
We need a global treaty to prohibit the activity of spam.
what about the spammers outside of California? Do we get to sue them?
Remember, you still have to prove in a civil court that some guy was sending you SPAM. Try mission impossible. The real way to deal with SPAM is to filter out all e-mail from individuals that you don't know.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
:0 Have a nice day.
Yeah, right.
Simply passing anti-spam legislation isn't enough, the key issue is enforcement and ease with which one can receive damages. Junk fax laws have been on the books in the United States for a long time, but anyone who owns a personal fax machine knows that they don't amount to much -- the junk fax companies know that only the tiniest minority of people go through the machinations required to actually bring a suit in small claims court and win their US$500, so they continue doing it.
The same thing will apply for any anti-spam law. If the consumer has to go through hoops in order to collect damages, the vast majority won't, and so spammers will continue their spamming knowing that any money they lose due to lawsuits will be far down the line and will be a tiny percentage of the total amount of money they've received from companies to hawk their wares.
So when I sue the Nigerians who spam me, will they want my bank account number to deposit the funds for the judgement? I figure that I can sue them for $16 million dollars by now.
Open source development is my way of competing with the low-cost programmers in India...
Technically, this will involve very little suing of actual spammers. What this will involve is going after the spammer's customers - those businesses that are foolish enough to purchase spamming services. The thing is that spamming doesn't make you any money directly. You have to find someone willing to pay you to spam for them. And, while it's pretty easy to set up a spam box somewhere offshore, it's not so easy to set up an entire penis-enlargement firm or "herbal viagra" firm offshore, especially if you still want to do business in the US. So, if the people actually trying to sell products find themselves at legal risk, they're much less likely to avail themselves of a spammer's services, even if the spammer has minimized his own legal risks.
I've been getting about 20 spams/day, and did some checking into where most of it comes from. And 90% of it comes from the USA.
About half of that was coming from various domains that turned out to be owned by emailhello.com. To their credit, I sent them a mail requesting I be removed from their lists, and that I not be forwarded onto anyone else. They replied saying they'd remove me with 48hours, and true to their word, they did.
This speculation that most spam doesn't come from the USA is uniformed fud, and mostly untrue!
What I think would do the most good in dealing with a spammer is a class action suit, or at least a suit that involves many plaintiffs. See, most folks aren't going to want to go throuth the trouble to individually sue a spammer because they don't see the reward as being worth the time and effort involved. And this is usually true.
HOWEVER, if you get a group of people together and coordinate the court action, you could do some real damage. True, no one will get any more than they would've gotten individually, but you have more people to work on the suit. You might even manage to find a pissed-off attorney who is also a victim of the spammer who will take the case. What you'd want to do is to get enough victims together to file a suit big enough to financially ruin the spammer, then, when you have all your ducks in a row, drop the bomb. Assuming you've done your homework and chosen your target well, so that you know who he is, where he lives, and are able to serve him one way or another, you're going to cause him a world of hurt. At that point, he has some choices to make. He can not show up, in which case he loses by default. He can show up and try to represnet himself, in which case he will either botch things up and lose, or he will have to work like hell to prepare a decent defense. Finally, he can hire an attorney, spend lots of money, and possibly still lose. In any case, he's going to lose lots of time and/or money. And what if he doesn't pay the judgement? If it's large enough, you may be able to get a collection agency to hound him until he pays up or dies, whichever comes first.
I'm not saying this will be a walk in the park, but if you get enough people together, you can make it a viable route. And if this tactic is used successfully a few times, you'll see spammers start to rethink their business models.
And one other thing. When you file the suit, hold a press conference to announce it. You see this all the time when someone sues a big corporation. Make sure every news organization under the sun knows about it. And if the guy happens to be a spammer-for-hire, you might mention at the press conference that you're going to soon determine whether you're also going to sue whatever businesses are using the spammer to promote their products. Then watch them start ducking for cover.
With one caveat. Express permission can be sold/purchased in the form of a merger, buyout, or other absorbtion of one company by another. If I say that I want info about when the next version of Foo from Foo Systems, Inc. comes out, and they get bought by Real-eBar, and form Real-eFooBar, Inc I still want said information about the Real-eFooBar product.
It's important to be extremely precise when defining these thing to avoid unnecessarily preventing legitimate commerce. If the law is too broad, it will get struck down, and you'll be back to square one---or worse.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
http://www.spamcop.net
Traces the true origin of the spam despite attempts to forge email address and server of origin. When you report a spam through them, they keep a copy with the full trace logs to prove and verify it was sent to your email address and where it came from. It also reports violaters to the isp's and spamvertised websites with a full copy of this report which is enough to have accounts terminated. Now this doesnt work with douchebags like upnetworks.com or verio.net or exodus.net or skynetweb.net...
Now if the Judicial system could just link up with them to make filing of cases easier...
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
How long until I start getting spam from lawyers wanting to sue other spammers on my behalf?
Sig is on vacation
If you are really an ISP in California, you already have the legal right to sue for spam. What this bill does is extend that right to everyone.
Sorry,
I think the only people they catch will be college students with too much time (don't anything to back this up but).
The small number of professional spammers will not be caught, because they will find a way around that.
But it is a start none the less.
Obviously this is not the same as product liability, which for all its evils, in many cases has made us safer in our homes, cars, and places of work.
Physicians know very well the nightmare involved in any kind of malpractice action.
While the Calif. legislature's intentions are good, the problems with this law will prevent it ever having its intended effect.
The only think it will do is make a small number of California lawyers very wealthy.
The fix for spam (lowercase letters only!) has to involve shutting down open relays, ISP and individual filtering, and carefully crafted criminal legislation. For instance, we don't sue crank phone callers, we prosecute them criminally. Likewise, the new federal law against junk phone calls and the federal do-not-call list have criminal penalties, ie, large fines. Those are the laws that have forced junk callers to change their behavior. This is the direction most likely to be successful with spam as well.
This doesn't do jack people for us people, just another open loophole law that was passed so the politicians have "busy work"
Most spam is sent out through a 3rd party, who usually hides behind all kinds of nifty little things like hijacked SMTP servers and spoofed IP addresses. My freinds dad was a spammer, so I'm quite aquainted with thier operations.
Let's say, I recieve a spam from penis enlargement corporation. I try to sue, PEC just points out that the spam wasn't sent by them, it was sent by "insert spam company here" and they're off the hook.
The law needs to include the customer of the spam house, otherwise it's going to be ineffective.
I'd *really* like e-mail coming from domain.com to actually come from domain.com. I.e. No fake-mail. If you have the email-address user@domain.com, you should also have to authorize with the domain.com servers in order to send mail. And mail servers should verify that mail from domain.com actually was sent by a domain.com server (they must know where the mail is to be delivered to that domain, why not if it was *sent* to that domain?).
Yes, I know that *unless* you do/can authenticate with your email server now, this will break a few setups. And it's not the end-all of spam solutions. But it'd sure be a good help.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is a DIE-IN!
EVERYBODY who doesn't support bush's imperialistaic policies and bloodlust for oil POST HERE and we'll clog teh article!!!!
DOWN with Bush and Blair, let the IRAQUI PEOPLE choose there government and if saddam is it then let it be!!! GIVE EVIL nothing to OPPOSE and it will CEASE TO EXIST!
WE WILL BE HEARED! CONSERVATIVE MEDIA (slashdot) let our VOICE THROGUH!!!
How do people feel about scripts to fill website logs with crap? Here's mine, quick and dirty, written in about 30 seconds because I was pissed off:
#!/bin/bashCOUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 10000 ]; do
lynx -dump http://www.resumeagencies.com/recruiterspage.asp?
sleep 1
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Note the fact that I'm calling what I hope is a dynamic page, so with luck, I'm wasting their server's processor time. The script is otherwise, as you can see, completely unrefined.
Legality, anyone? Other problems (despite the obvious fact that I have to waste my bandwidth to fuck with spammers)? Obviously, it's a DoS attack of sorts, but then again, so is an unsolicited e-mail. If they want to challenge me legally on that point, then I will do the same to them. My website very clearly points to the policies which apply to all e-mails sent to my domain.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Make it a little more interesting. When they use open proxies to spam you anonymously, use the same open proxies to attack them anonymously.
The beauty of the system is that they find the open proxies for you just by trying to use them to deliver mail.
Smart filtering does work, and it's been around a little while now. There's no excuse for Microsoft not including it in Outlook Express, the most common email application by far. They key to stopping spam is smart filtering for the masses. Then it would be hard enough to send spam that few would bother to try.
Personally, I'm using POPFile, and it works great.
Since when does a law prevent anybody with a certain criminal potential from doing something? Will the law apply to spammers in China, Korea or other countries? Do these countries have legal treaties about spam with Western countries? Does the death penalty in many US states reduce the number of murders in these states? Duh.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
I can tell you that I'm almost certain where my email address(s) have been picked up from. I kick started my new domain about 3 years ago. So I was totally spam free in the beginning. That continued until one day I started posting to a Newsgroup and forgot to create an alias for the first post, using my real address instead. Almost immediately I started getting spam. Just one post, just one stinkin lapse of concentration was all it took. I could have kicked myself. After that I used aliases which I would delete when they became too big a target.
The next source was from online discussion forums. The KDE debug forum to be exact. Again, the "kbug" mail alias I was using on that list was a big give away. That got deleted too.
The only other source that I don't have much control over is e-cards. I had a big jump in spam just after receiving some e-cards over Christmas. That's how I think I got on emailhello's radar. So next time you're thinking of sending a friend an e-card for their birthday or whatever, think again. You just might be doing them a big disservice.
What's it all mean?
The only thing wrong I see is 2 wrongs don't make a right. You have no finincial loss from their spam (your ISP might but you legally don't). They might have a legally recognized finacial loss. SO if you both DO end up in court and are both found guilty...they have to repay the $0.00 they cost you, you have to repay the X numbers of thousands of dollars that they say you cost them. Might not be what you want.
The light in the tunnel was the train.
Won't work.. your solution makes sense, which is enough to keep it from going anywhere. ;)
Plus, there's no profit in it.