Microsoft Files 15 Lawsuits Against Spammers

Popsikle writes "A Seattle Paper reports that 'Microsoft Corp. announced it has filed 15 lawsuits against alleged e-mail spammers in Washington state and the United Kingdom on Tuesday.' It states the tough anti-spam laws in UK and Washington allows ISP's to sue spammers. This could be a good test of the new anti-spam laws." There's coverage on CNN as well. Microsoft has picked a good venue for such a case.

Comments

Full list of charges including details

[Wizard of OS]

A full list can be found on microsoft's site:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/Ju n0 3/0617SpamEnforcementFS.asp

</karmawhore>

And Korean spam?

[Groote Ka]

At least half the spam I get comes from Korean companies in Korea. When will I be freed from that spam? No US or UK law is going to change that, unless all e-mails from those IP addresses are blocked.

So this ends up in the next global legislation mess: we all agree that we need global legislation, but the big fight is whether is will be US, European or one of the SE Asian.

And this mess will only be solved when all governments have the same interests.

Re:Ok, Whatever

[Utopia]

You must have a easily guessable hotmail address.
My hotmail username has a number & a special character in it. It has never recieved any spam in the 5 years that I have been using it.

Re:What about MS

[mosschops]

Just this morning I got 5 emails from hotmail accounts asking if I wanted:

Spammers fake the sender's address all the time. If you dug into the mail header details I'm willing to bet they didn't come from Hotmail servers.

Try typing this in exactly as shown:

telnet your.smtp.server 25
HELO somedomain.com
MAIL FROM:
RCPT TO:
DATA
Subject: junk subject line

junk body text
.

The blank line after the subject and the dot on the line by itself are important.

Congratulations - you've just sent yourself a forged e-mail. Easy wasn't it? :-)

Re:Gorilla Against Spam!! (GAS)

[Nato_Uno]

Under the Washington law (Revised Code of Washington 19.190) both the end-user recipient and the "interactive computer service" that that recipient uses may sue the spammer. The "interactive computer service" is not suing on the user's behalf, but on their own behalf.

And I think this is great, personally. If all major ISPs did this, SPAM load would go down significantly. Of course it wouldn't disappear completely, and the really tricky spammers would be trickier, but the overall load would certainly go down and the remaining SPAM would very likely be easier to block...

BBC2 'money programme' on spammers tonight

[illtud]

The BBC's The Money Programme are doing an edition on junk (postal) mail and spam tonight at 19:30 BST. The Money Programme tends to be fairly influential and usually has high journalistic and production values.

If you're in the UK, or have access to BBC2 tonight, watch it!

Re:Gorilla Against Spam!! (GAS)

[Kierthos]

Ah yes, yet another clueless jackass who doesn't know exactly how the First Amendment works.

To enlighten you would take far more time then I have. In fact, I suspect that the sun would go cold long before knowledge pentrated the thickness of your skull.

So, simply put:

The First Amendment, aka Freedom of Speech, only applies to the government attempting to abridge speech. If a ISP says "You can't send spam on our servers", then tough shit, cousin, it's not a First Amendment violation.

Kierthos