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"

Comments

How does this work in other states?

[Sirion]

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?

Geeks asleep at the wheel

[johnynek]

I don't see why so many people at /. cheer Gov't getting involved in the spam problem. I have been using CRM-114 and SpamAssassin for several months and the result is: it works. I get something like 4-5 times as much spam as non-spam, and *VERY* rarely does a spam message find its way into my inbox now.

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!

Fine and dandy....

[pastorBernie]

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

Law is fine, but could we get a little tech help?

[Kjella]

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