Inappropriate Spam Reaching Children?

peeweejd writes "Wired has an article stating that four out of five children receive inappropriate spam e-mail touting get-rich-quick schemes, and almost half receive spam linking to pornographic materials. Should spammers be held responsible for the spams they send out? Can someone sue a spammer for offering to sell 'adult only' items/services to children?" There are more details from survey originator Symantec's press release - and yes, Symantec does sell mail filtering software.

Comments

Re:whats worse

[aoteoroa]

You might be tied into outlook at work but give your children mozilla mail.

• The spam filter will delete *most* porns as soon as they come in
• To neutralize any html spam that slips past their filter you can choose to not: "load remote images in mail and newsgroup messages" (It has the added side benefit of protecting your kids from cgi scripts that track when they read their email messages)

Re:They don't break down the age groups

[pHDNgell]

I wish they disclosed the breakdown of ages. There is a vast difference in seventeen year old reading e-mail without their parents and seven year olds.

My seven year old reads email on her own. Any email she receives that is not coming from someone on a whitelist that I maintain goes into a mailbox under her mother's account (this is after spam filtering, of course).

Her mom will drop it into her inbox or whatever when it's appropriate, and let her know that she got this mail, and usually ask me to add it to her whitelist.

(sorry for the confusing pronouns, this would be easier to explain if I had a boy).