Good Guys 2, Spammers 0

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Posted by timothy on Wednesday September 10, 2003 @06:50AM from the except-for-the-rest-of-the-score dept.

JoeJob writes "A couple of victories in the legal war against spammers. First, a Washington resident has been awarded a $250,000 decision against a spammer that sent him 58,000 copies of a spam. Second, looks like the spammers who are trying to sue Spamhaus, SPEWS, and other spam blacklists have decided to tuck their tails and run. Let's hope this trend continues." If you care to celebrate this, one food springs to mind.

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Musubi by drpentode · 2003-09-10 06:56 · Score: 5, Informative

Spam and rice is what my Hawaiian college buddies called it. You could smell it all the way down the drom hall. And it tastes really good. Really. ;) Kind of reminds me of sushi, only saltier.
First time I've heard of CAUCE by Trigun · 2003-09-10 06:58 · Score: 5, Informative

you can sign up at their How Can I Help page, and apparently it costs nothing to join.

If you're not in the U.S., you can sign up to their international chapters:
EuroCAUCE - Serving the entire continent
CAUBE.AU - Serving Australia, New Zealand, and all of the Pacific Rim
CAUCE Canada
CAUCE India - Serving Asia and the Indian subcontinent

I'll be signing up today.
Hate Spam? Use SpamBayes by notsewmit · 2003-09-10 07:01 · Score: 3, Informative

The best anti-spam tool I've found so far is SpamBayes, a great open source app that lets you decide what is spam and what isn't. Just train it for a few days (perhaps longer depending how much Spam you get in a day) and it'll filter all the junk mail to a separate folder. If there are any false positives (or negatives), just move it to a "good" folder and train it again. After a week of training, it hasn't failed once!
Re:Virus Spam by grub · 2003-09-10 07:02 · Score: 3, Informative

You can filter at the server end based on subject:
# "Subject" blocks LOCAL_CONFIG HSubject: $>Subject D{Subject}Re: My details SSubject R${Subject} $#error $: "553 Reject - Likely worm infection."
Of course if you don't run your own server, you're SOL.

--
Trolling is a art,
Re:Where did they find this lawyer? by lx805 · 2003-09-10 07:12 · Score: 5, Informative

Thats the funny thing: they *DIDN'T* find the lawyer.

Mark Felstein is not only the representing council for EMarketersAmerica, he's also their sole corporate officer, and as far as anyone can tell, their only member. The EMA was formed mere weeks before the lawsuit was filed.

One of the defendants assertions has always been that EMarketersAmerica was formed for the sole purpose of filing the lawsuit. In fact, somewhere on the NANAE threads was a remark that Felstein admitted that he would dissolve EMarketersAmerica at his earliest opportunity once the lawsuit was resolved.

Of course, the defendants might have a thing or two to say about that...
Re:Fuck SPEWS by Thuktun · 2003-09-10 07:35 · Score: 3, Informative

Under your "logic" (note the quotes), you would encourage a city to put up military roadblocks, and prevent anyone from going in, when they find one crack dealer in your neighborhood.

Please. SPEWS is intended for blocking email, not EVERYTHING.

I have the freedom to associate with whomever I want. So do you. Do not our servers have the right to associate with whichever servers we choose? Apparently not, in your opinion.

And when you go to complain, noone exists. Not "you know their name, but don't have access to them", but "nobody knows their names, and we won't tell you".

There's a reason for that, too. Simply running a blocklist, no matter how gentle, will get you harassment from spammers, death threats, frivolous lawsuits, etc. Those who formed SPEWS simply wanted to avoid all that. (I am not SPEWS, nor do I know who is.)
Re:So.. by Eggplant62 · 2003-09-10 08:16 · Score: 4, Informative

You must really hate that spam. or really hate freedom. nobody likes spam, sure, but this whole scene is really about encouraging the government to regulate communication. i find it amazing that the slashdot crowd who are usually such virulent defenders of an unfettered internet are more than willing to give the government more control when it comes to penis-pill ads!
We love freedom, freedom from assholes who think that they own our inboxes. A marketer's right to push his information into my living room ends at my doorstep, whether it be physical or electronic. This isn't about freedom of speech in this case at all, as it's been determined before that commercial entities have a very limited right to freedom of speech.

See U.S. Supreme Court
ROWAN v. U. S. POST OFFICE DEPT., 397 U.S. 728

Chief Justice BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court:

"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit.... The ancient concept that 'a man's home is his castle' into which 'not even the king may enter' has lost none of its vitality.... We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. That we are often 'captives' outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech and other sound does not mean we must be captives everywhere.... The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."

You can read the entire Supreme Court decision on the FindLaw web page (http://www.findlaw.com/). The specific URL is http://www.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US &vol=397&invol=728.

Then of course, there's the CyberPromo/AOL lawsuit, in which the judge held that CP had no First Amendment right to send UCE to AOL's customers. The transcript for that case can be found at:

http://www.leepfrog.com/E-Law/Cases/Cyber_Promo_v_ AOL.html

Note: Most of this was lifted verbatim from Message-ID: 343A9BBF.4340@stanford.edu