Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

UK Makes Spamming a Fineable Offense

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the get-your-punish-on dept.

woodhouse writes "The BBC has an article about the new UK anti-spamming law which comes into force later this year. Under the new law, spammers can be fined up to 5000 pounds in a magistrates court, or an unlimited amount in the crown court. Sadly, prison terms won't be used to enforce of the new law."

5 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. spamhaus rebutts this claim by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why the law won't work

    1. Re:spamhaus rebutts this claim by rokzy · · Score: 3, Informative

      both.

      one refers to people ("private individuals").

      the other refers to businesses.

  2. register reports otherwise by deadmongrel · · Score: 4, Informative

    check out register.co.uk call it a toothless tiger. more like a pussy(oops!) read the article here http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/32914.html

  3. Don't hold your breath - need to see it in action by IIH · · Score: 4, Informative

    While it sounds great on the surface, just look at the corresponding fine for breaching the UK telephone do not call list - this is also up to 5,000, but no one has ever been fined despite 250 complaints a week being received over the past four years.

    --
    Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
  4. Anti-spam needs more structure. by DuSTman31 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Personally, I think the main thing that would benefit the anti-spam cause now is more structure - in a software sense.

    There's already quite a few good, pretty effective techniques of filtering, but a truly best-case scenario would be arrived at using a combination of techniques.

    Look at the anti-spam tech available at the moment. There's filters that act as POP3 proxies, filters that run as a plug-in to a specific client (or built-in), and the odd mail server add-in. There's even the case of remote mailboxes (eg using IMAP) which is difficult to deal with any way apart from having the filter on the server.

    Spam filtering is best set-up on a client-by-client basis, because people tend to get different types of mail as normal. Also, if we're doing it on a client-by-client basis, end user interface is very important - any manual classification and configuration of such filters would be best done inside the user interface of the client software, in much the same way as client-specific plugins do it. To do this in a way consistent across client packages (necessary if we want to tackle the problem as a whole and not just for some people) would require a standard protocol for querying graphs of mail filters, relaying any corrections and reconfiguring said filter graph.

    I'd like to see a protocol built upon Seive (a language in RFC form for notating mail filtering rules) and a standard for mail filter components (standard COM/CORBA interfaces, whatever). The seive language could provide flexibly reconfigurable "plumbing" between the individual filters.

    Even if one only uses one filter under such a mechanism, there'd still be benefits from a standardised software interface and ability to control from within any mail client.