Senate Passes Anti-Spam Bill

Zendar writes "Yahoo! is reporting that the 'U.S. Senate passed the first national anti-spam bill on Wednesday, giving momentum to an issue that has riled consumers almost as much as dinnertime phone calls.' However, the bill, referred to as the 'Can Spam' bill, is unlikely to pass the House and be signed by the President. Senator John McCain sums it up: 'The odds of defeating spam by legislation alone is extremely low, but that does not mean we should stand idly by and do nothing about it.' CNN also has the story."

Comments

Stuck with Outlook?

[rjamestaylor]

If you're one of the many who doesn't really have a choice but to use Outlook on Windows, there is anti-spam help available in the form of an open source SourceForge project called SpamBayes.

I downloaded and installed the latest version last night and am very impressed with this seemlessly integrated Bayesian Spam Filter (make sure anti-virus software is disabled before installing -- which can be difficult with McAfee as I discovered).

Very much recomeeded.

Re:Politicians for Ya

[kiatoa]

Yup, all available fronts is good. Now, how about as many folks as possible start using the Active Spam Killer? I've been using it for a month or two and it seems great. If enough people used it then the wind would be taken out of the spammers sails (sales?) so to speak and the problem of spam would go away. Why spam if the message ain't getting through. So, hop over to sourceforge and download/install a-s-k, and do your part in the war against spam.

Re:Follow the cash

[Pieroxy]

That's not the way spam works. An independant entity is doing SPAM and it is based in Russia. It will advertise "Get the lower rates for your mortgage" for example. Then, when someone respond to that and give its name/address, the Russian company will sell the personal informations collected to any company willing to pay $2 (or $n) for it in the U.S.

See, the mortgage company is not involved in the SPAM at all! The mortgage company just buys the name/addres of someone interested by low rates.

No one does anything wrong in the U.S. with this model.

Who Can Prosecute?

[schnarff]

After reading about this in the Washington Post, where they noted that only e-mail providers or government entities could bring suit, I decided to look up the actuall bill to see if I, as a private e-mail administrator, could bring an action against someone under this bill. The text in question, however, said only "A provider of Internet access service adversely affected" could bring action. So I wrote my Senators to find out if they meant this to be only those who provide actual ISP service, or if people like me who run private e-mail servers could bring complaints. Should be interesting to find out what they say.

Buyer Beware!

[Angram]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: You have to make buying from spam illegal. You can't prosecute the international spam supply - you can target the domestic demand for spam, however. It's simple economics, people!

Just use a "+"

[ClioCJS]

There is. It's the plus symbol. This tends to only work on unix server, but anything after a "+" but before the "@" is ignored by your mailserver.

So let's say my address is ClintXYZ@unix.org. I could sign up for something as ClintXYZ+ajkfdsjdfasjoifdoj@unix.org and the email would still be received by me.

Come up with a system, like ClintXYZ+yahoodotcom@unix.org. Then, if a spammer ever harvests your address, and doesn't cleanse out the extra characters, and then spams you, you will know it was yahoodotcom that did it. [This is just an example; don't sue me Yahoo.]

This has worked at least once for me (After doing it for a few years). A yahoo store violated yahoo privacy policy by doing this, and I reported them to yahoo. Never followed up though.

It's also good for mailfiltering. ClintXYZ+slashdot@unix.org for example if I wanted to filter everything that came from slashdot into its own filter.

Beware of webforms that don't allow +'s in the email addresss. It's a grey area of email address validity.