Slashdot Mirror
Michigan's Proposed Spam Law Called Toughest In U.S.
goats_in_boats writes "A new bill (PDF
or HTML)
was presented to the Governor
of Michigan that would require spam sent to residents of the State to be identified
as such. Highlights include the requirement that unsolicited email 'Include in
the e-mail subject line "ADV:" as the first 4 characters' and that 'a person who
violates this act is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not
more than 1 year or a fine of not more than $10,000.00, or both.' An article
in the Detroit Free Press calls the bill 'the most stringent anti-spam law in
the nation.'"
How does this apply to out-of-state offenders Vs in-state recipients, or in-state offenders Vs out-of-state recipients. I've never really figured out how US law works... too many different states with local discrepencies :-)
Would sure be nice if you could nail any spammer from anywhere in the US if you're a Michigan system... I bet it'd be a good place to set up an email server too.
Well, I have to say I finally got a Bayesian Spam filter when the Outlook plug in came out so, for now, it's like back in the days when no one knew my email. Only 1 in 20 spams scores less then 98%, and only one in a hundred regular messages score more then 3%. It's fantastic!
That said, I'd still be for this law, as long as it was fair. That is to say, if the sender had a 'reasonable' expectation that the person expected to receive mail from them (i.e. opt-in, or if you signed up for a service from them and never opted out). Similar to the 'business relationship' in the Telemarketing laws.
One important thing is to make it clear that you can't sell "lists". I've been sent spams that said "Cd of Opt-in emails" or whatever. It's like, come on. I don't know if I would want to send people to jail for screwing up like that. Jail and very harsh Spam fines should be reserved, IMO for habitual offenders, you know the lowest of the low types like Ralsky, etc, who relay and proxy scan, forge headers, etc.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Isn't Alan Ralsky from Michigan? If so, then maybe he's the reason this law was passed in MI.
as harassment? Then it's a federal thing and I can nab all those jerks!
On another note, I haven't gotten a single spam since I firewalled off the nation of China from incoming smtp connections.
From what I've heard, AOL's policy of denying access from everyone with less than a T3 line isn't nearly as successful. This jerks don't remember whitelist requests by their victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsubscribers, and they don't honor whitelist or rewhitelist requests by syadmins. They don't offer any explanation for an entry disappearing from their whitelist other than "maybe you're running an open relay." I'm not, and I'm sick of getting user complaints spawned by the death throws of that evil leviathon.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I wonder where spammed pick up your e-mail addr.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
Don't believe the hype - it's just another opt-out proposal. Opt-out is a flawed scheme only ever pushed by people who are naive to both the technical and practical issues. It's an enormous waste of resources (bandwidth, energy, people's time), and at the end of the day it's only partially solved just one of the issues at the expense of ensuring that we'll never solve any of the others. This really is a case of "the slippery slope exists and it will happen".
Like all the other opt-out schemes, all you have to do is opt-out of those 50 million emails you're about to receive. Legitimately. Enjoy your day.
Section 4 of the bill covers this:
I think it is essential that these sorts of requirements be part of any anti-spam bill. While requiring that the header contain ADV: is nice for the user, what about the operator of the user's ISP? And in particular, what about the operator who runs an honest ISP, does not allow relaying through their servers, yet still gets overloaded with incorrectly directed complaints when a spam shop uses their domain in part of the forged headers? I don't see nearly enough attention paid to that concern (disclaimer: I operate an ISP).
Believe it or not, as funny as my post may have been, I REALLY have been receiving spam today with "ADV:" in the subject.......
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
A commercial is a commercial. I don't care if you're selling deoderant, furniture, or penis enlargement pills. I want none of them on my property or obstructing my view in any way.
If you with to place them peripherally, that's a legitimate ad. If it's directly in my line-of-vision when I'm trying to do something like check email or sort through my snail mail, then you are asking for a retaliatory response from me. This law is one such response.
I suggest you read Slashdot
I'd just like to point folks to this in hopes that we can collectively steer this topic where it ought to be with our elected officials. Alternately, we could take Lessig up on his bet.
A criminal statute allows for jail, true. However, only one class of people can actually file criminal complaints: law enforcement. Peace officers and prosecutors.
You can call your local police department to make a complaint. However, except for certain types of crimes (Domestic violence and protective order violations in my state-most are similar) there is no law prohibiting us from sending the complaint straight to the shredder. As a point of Federal law (Federal district court ruling for WA DC, sustained on appeal) the police and prosecutors do not have a duty to any one particular person.
In other words, not much will change. A few cases may be filed. Most, however, will end up sitting in some detective's inbox until the statute of limitations expires. My department doesn't even have enough detectives to cover all of the stuff that needs detective followup: if a burglary/auto theft/just about any nonviolent property crime isn't thoroughly handled by the patrol officer taking the initial complaint, it'll languish marked "inactive-open pending leads" forever. The info-hogs can only follow up on the leads in the bluesuits' reports.
Now, take a wild guess how many patrol officers are qualified to handle these. I may be the only one here. And I spent today (a relatively quiet Monday dayshift) taking cold crime reports, three neighborhood disturbances (two of which weren't even criminal and one was petty enough not to charge anyone with anything) one unwanted subject (started screaming in a McDonalds and didn't leave when the manager invited him to eat elsewhere) and a drunk driver.
When I work swing shift, my normal shift, I'm running from call to call to call. It'll be close to midnight before I have time to follow up on a funny email. I think my time from 11 PM to end-of-shift is better spent on drunk drivers.
In other words, most cops will consider this to be a waste of time that could be better spent on areas where someone might actually get hurt.
That's why it's CIVIL spam laws that actually matter. The clown who wrote this law knows we won't be able to really do much, living in the real world and all. A civil law, OTOH, with a private right of action, would make the spammers shit themselves with fear and consider career changes. That's because a victim with the legal power to act may actually do something, when the police don't have the resources.
Some will complain that it's not their responsibility to do anything, even when the whiner is also the original victim. Who has the moral responsibility to act is an open question. However, the real question IMHO is 'if you don't give a shit, and you're the victim, then why should I care?' And if someone can't be bothered to take an interest in his own life, then I've got better things to do than fix his minor annoyances for him.
As mentioned in other posts many mailer servers are able to prematurely reject an email once they've received the subject line and drop the connexion and the rest of the content.
In practice, that just doesn't work very well. Most SMTP clients will continue to retry a message that fails after DATA and before <CRLF>.<CRLF>. I don't see it directly addressed, but section 4.2.5 of RFC-2821 implies that a hard failure (e.g., 5xy) is not really valid in the middle of DATA.
--Bill
home
gimme back my
I've had the same email account for 20+ years. Two years ago, spam was a minor annoyance. One year ago it was annoying enough that I started using spamassassin. This year it is annoying enough that I can cope only by using spamassassin with a bayes filter. Next year?
Let me quantify my statements. In June 2002 I received 732 legitimate email messages and 375 spams. In June 2003 I received 683 legitimate email messages, and 1872 spams. in June 2004, I expect to receive 700 legitimate messages; how many spams? Let's start a pool!
Technology is cool but not a panacea. I ran a personal version of Spamassassin 2.60 on my last 15 months' email. Every decision was fed back into the automatic learning process, and every incorrect decision was corrected manually. Here are the numbers:
total legit: 13726
total spam: 11441
false positives: 11
false negatives: 272
These numbers look good (2.3% of spams slip through under the radar and 0.08% of legit mail gets trapped). But they aren't that good. The numbers mean that one or two spams a day get through right now, and who-knows-how-many next year. Hardly an adequate approach to keeping offensive material from my eyes. The numbers also mean that I would have missed 11 legitimate messages in the last year or so had I not sifted through the crap.
While I'm not holding my breath for a legislative panacea, I believe that something has to be done to check the uncontrolled growth in the volume of spam being sent. Receiver-end controls won't cope.
As I have mentioned in a previous comment, I believe that the volume can be abated by prohibiting deceptive email, as opposed to trying to adjudicate the consensuality of the relationship between sender and receiver.
I'm not a lawyer but maybe this kind of tack would work...
Population of Michigan ~ 10,000,000 (Estimate from here)
Population of the World ~ 6,250,000,000 (Estimate from here)
Now provided that spam has a regular distribution, that means that one in every 625 spam emails will be sent to a Michigan resident. Given that spam is sent to thousands of addresses each day, there is a reasonable expectation that at least one of the recipients is from Michigan.
Due to the very nature of spam, it would be easier for the spammers to comply overall rather than to make efforts to determine the real destination of each message.
Aside from the significant limitation imposed by this being a state law (who can tell if a particular E-mail address belongs to a Michigan resident or not?), this law will likely fail because as soon as users (or providers) start to filter ADV:, the spammers will stop putting it in the Subject line, and there are too many of them out there for law enforcement to go after.
Japan enacted a law similar to this in July of last year, requiring that all UCE have a subject beginning with the Japanese equivalent of "ADV:". Spammers started following the law pretty quickly; so far so good. Then, last October, cell phone provider NTT DoCoMo started up a service that would let users reject such mail at the server. Having been subjected to lots of cellphone spam until then, I was very delighted at this, and as soon as I switched it on my spam level dropped to roughly zero.
Until this past May, when spam once again found its way to my phone. The spammers seem to have realized that adding the mandated text makes their mail not reach its destination, so they've decided to just ignore the law completely. I spoke with someone at the agency that handles spam complaints, and was told that "we're doing what we can, but there are so many of them it's hard to keep up."
C'est la vie, I guess--or should I say, shikata nai desu ne...
This is a very bad idea. The law is draconian in its punishment (1 year in jail) for so minor an infraction (1 spam!?!) that it is guaranteed to be misused. This will be a political tool and nothing else. Whenever the government wants to stick some guy in jail, they'll discover some ancient SPAM message and stick the guy in jail.
This law is overeaching and overbroad, and the slashdot community should be ashamed for cheering it. Karma be damned,