First CAN-SPAM Lawsuit Filed in California

rocketjam writes "Foster City, California-based ISP Hypertouch, Inc. has filed the first lawsuit alleging violations of the new Federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. The lawsuit was filed against BobVila.com and the spammer they hired, Bluestream Media, for sending Hypertouch customers unwanted, unsolicited email advertisements for Vila's "Home Again Newsletter." The suit alleges the defendents sent spam email ads with fraudulent headers and no physical address. It also alleges the emails were sent to randomly generated and harvested addresses as well as addresses that had replied to opt-out links in other spams. Hypertouch's attorney, John L. Fallat, said the CAN-SPAM Act offers little protection to the public, but they would use the few protections it offers to punish spammers." Reader Clemence links to Wired's coverage of the suit.

Comments

Fraud

[ScooterBill]

IANAL so I'll ask this question.

Faking an email header, return address, etc. is supposedly illegal under CAN-SPAM. If this is fraud, then wasn't this illegal before CAN-SPAM?

M

Re:Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, everything's a little weirder with CANned-SPAM around...
-os

Re:Fraud

[Tango42]

To you and me (and the rest of /.), that might make sense, because we are used to thinking of the internet as just another part of life. For some (most) people, that isn't yet the case. They seem to think that something happening online is inherently different from the same thing happening IRL. That will probably change over the next decade, but until then laws will have to be tested twice, once for real life, and then again for the net.

Re:Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

No it wasn't. To wit, if I ask a girl for her phone number, and she gives me a fake one, is that fraud under some law? No. However, pretend next year a law is passed that says girls giving out fake phone numbers at bars is now illegal because it is fraudulant. The point is, everything dishonest isn't fraud. Think of fraud as a subset of dishonest activities that can be added to and subtracted to as society sees fit. Now, all that took was a little bit of thought on my part. Next time, instead of offering a knee jerk reaction, try to think a bit before your post. You may be amazed at the capabilities of your own mind, then again...

Re:Fraud

[www.sorehands.com]

Why don't you use your brain. There is more than one definition of fraud. Now if that same girl gives you her phone number, then you buy drinks and dinner for her, that can be fraud.

There is also fraudalent advertising that does not require the element of reliance to be considered.

Now, if you claim you are JFK's son anwhen you meet a woman, then you date her, you are committing a fraud (presuming you are not JFKs son), but then may not have the requirments for a fraud action in California.

Re:Fraud

[Horny Smurf]

"fraud under some law" -- "under some law" -- Ie, illegal. Sometimes lying is a crime (ask Martha Stewart!), most of the time it isn't.

Re:Fraud

[IANAAC]

No it wasn't. To wit, if I ask a girl for her phone number, and she gives me a fake one, is that fraud under some law? No. However, pretend next year a law is passed that says girls giving out fake phone numbers at bars is now illegal because it is fraudulant. The point is, everything dishonest isn't fraud.

If you're trying to sell me something with false information, it's fraud. If all your doing is trying to get someone drunk and naked, well...

Your example is just garden-variety dishonesty (unless, of course, one of you expects a bill or two left on the nightstand).

Re:Fraud

[pyrrhonist]

However, pretend next year a law is passed that says girls giving out fake phone numbers at bars is now illegal because it is fraudulant.

I, for one, will work towards making that a reality. ;)

Re:Fraud

[iminplaya]

Your example is just rose garden-variety dishonesty...

Emphasis mine

Kinda like "I did not have sex with that woman"?
Note: This is not a serious statement. Do not read anything into it. Do not read btween the lines. It doesn't matter who said it. It's still funny, so laugh, dammit.

Re:Fraud

[fermion]

The only fraud in that example is the implicit claim that you might be able to satisfy her.

Re:Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

the point of my post was in fact that there is more than one definition of fraud. thus, while forged mail headers have always been 'fraudlant', it has only been fraud under the law since the CAN-SPAM act, ergo the law is not redundant as per the initial poster's claim. get it now? that silly girl in a bar thing was just an illustration of that fact, but i should have known that any example involving alcohol and females would fly higher than a 747 over this crowd's collective heads.

Re:Fraud

[Maserati]

Rimshot !

Re:Fraud

[www.sorehands.com]

My point is that it was fraud before the I-CAN-SPAM act. The California law, the Wahington law, and many other states had laws that prohibited fraudulent headers.

Re:Fraud

[Xiamin]

To you and me (and the rest of /.), that might make sense, because we are used to thinking of the internet as just another part of life. For some (most) people, that isn't yet the case. They seem to think that something happening online is inherently different from the same thing happening IRL. That will probably change over the next decade, but until then laws will have to be tested twice, once for real life, and then again for the net.

Kind of like sales tax?

Re:Fraud

[OrangeTide]

So true. I've heard some pretty insane arguments against doing sales tax on the internet. I have no problem with paying my sales tax on all purchases even interstate and international purchases. Of course states have to be careful not to tax internet purchases differently, because it could be interpretered as a tariff and the constitution forbids states from setting up tarriffs. (only the federal goverment can do that). This is because, of course, the states are a union and are generally not supposed to interfer with interstate commerce.

A few states are leaving spots on income tax forms for people to fill in how much they owe in internet tax purchases.

Don't ask why this wasn't an issue with mail order companies years and years ago. Seems like everyone mail ordered all their gifts from Sears back when I was a kid. Perhaps because Sears would send you a catalog for the nearest location, but I seem to recall being able to request out of state catalogs. The shipping charges were the same, just no sales tax.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

At first I was kind of worried that the first target gone after was someone "respectable"-- bob vila-- and not like the people selling penis pumps or something.

But then I thought about it. How much of the problem is caused by ignorant businesses who just happen to hire the wrong marketing firm, and just say "we want you to increase our exposure on the internet" and don't realize this means millions of spam mails sent illegally through hijacked SMTP?

Perhaps to some degree education is the answer. If other legitimate businesses see bob vila getting smacked for spam mail, maybe they'll panic and make absolutely certain the people they're hiring aren't sending fraudulently-sent spam.

Re:Hmm

[Joe Wagner]

Well, we were in contact with them for a bit before we filled the suit. Even after we told them a number of their spam were sent to addresses that were submitted to the opt-out links of other spam, they still refused to promise to never use BlueStream Media again. Shortly before we filed the suit, one of our users recieved another BobVila UCE, this time from a spammer in Florida.

One of the most compelling aspects in deciding to file this case was that among the various emails messages in their spam run they managed violate nearly every ISP-actionable part of CAN-SPAM. Specifically various email of the spam run had one or more of the following violations:

1) No street address
2) False headers, including

a) SMTP HELO's with names whose IP addresses don't match the originating IP

b) Domain names used in the headers that were registered with false names...

3) Addresses that had been submitted to the opt-out mechanisms of other spam
4) Random and harvested addresses, include domain registration contact addresses.

Re:Hmm

[Masem]

I've gotten spam from the BlueStream Media group, that appears more legit than other spam (that is, they don't hide the fact they're advertizing something and yet the ad is readible, not mangled text, and so forth; eg it's nearly good enough to get past a number of spam filters because it looks like a legitamite written email), and representing other clients outside of BobVila. I personally think that's the way the fight has to go, is to make sure that the company that is being advertized in the spam, and not just the spam provider, is targetted in the suits, as once these companies realize that even if they don't send spam directly, usign spam to advertize is a bad idea.

Unfortunately, more than half of the spam I'm getting lately is now from the fake viagra ones, that, while using viagra, have nothing to do with pfiser, and the actual company isn't mentioned at all, so all you can do is go after the spammer, and not their source of funding.

Re:Hmm

[Smidge204]

A valid point. Unless they can proove that BobVila.com knew or explicitly ordered advertising in this form, then shouldn't the company that actually DID the spamming take most of the heat?

Although, in the long run, this might work out if BobVila.com loses. If hiring non-compliant spammers for advertizing becomes a liability, maybe they'll go out of business!
=Smidge=

Re:Hmm

[pongo000]

SMTP HELO's with names whose IP addresses don't match the originating IP

And all this time I thought HELO DUDE was a perfectly legit way of identifying oneself to an SMTP server...

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

"At first I was kind of worried that the first target gone after was someone "respectable"-- bob vila"

How respectable is Bob Vila if he hiring spamers?

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, so If I start faking spam on belalf of a company I hate, I can take revenge and have theyre asses sued.

Nice one, thanks for the ideas!

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Bob Vila isn't respectable, he's a terriable builder, all the houses he's worked on are falling apart. He's also getting sued for it too.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

If I start faking spam on belalf of a company I hate, I can take revenge and have theyre asses sued.

Really? So you can get them to admit that they authorized the spam too?

Moron.

Re:Hmm

[rixstep]

I don't know good ol' Bob Vila. For all I know, he's just another Nathan Arizona. But it's his business; he's ultimately responsible, as are Blue Stream. I say 'good' if it helps reduce spam.

Bob Vila might not have known, true, but that's highly unlikely. Blue Stream are in it up to their skinny necks. In either case, they're all responsible under the law, and be glad for that. Otherwise the classic defence will be 'we didn't know, and the employee who did that terrible thing for us is long gone, and we don't have a forwarding address'.

Re:Hmm

[ticklemeozmo]

a) SMTP HELO's with names whose IP addresses don't match the originating IP

That's interesting.. when you send a mail from a windows machine, it uses its NetBIOS name as it's HELO.

Surely, that's name doesn't match the original IP address when you try to resolve it from the recipients computer.

Is it me, or is this one of those overly broad clauses they only apply when they need to?

Re:Hmm

[toast0]

I personally prefer HELO there. You never know, you could be talking to a non-dude SMTP server... wouldn't want to get them mad at you when you haven't even sent any data yet. :)

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

For you that wouldn't work. You spell like shit.

Re:Hmm

[A Naughty Moose]

Got a link for that? And as I recall, watching some of those classic "This Old House" episodes, he rarely, if ever did any work. He was the supervisor who knew enough to know that he needed to outsource just about everything.

Re:Hmm

[iminplaya]

If they ever find him guilty of anything, they can make him do community service, like, for instance, he can build "This old Half-way House" for Martha Stewart.

Re:Hmm

[Zeinfeld]

Well, we were in contact with them for a bit before we filled the suit.

I don't know what kind of stunt you are pulling here, but I don't really give a whole heap of credibility to someone who files a lawsuit and then goes talking about it on slashdot.

When the CANSPAM act was being debated at the FTC the big issue everyone was worried about was that the law would be used by gold-diggers against the folk with the deepest pockets. This is apparently what had happened in Utah were the act quickly became a full employment act for lawyers. That is why the act is a lot weaker than some anti-spam campaigners would like.

This debate quickly ends up like the abortion debate. Both sides start to look pretty ugly. Instead of all this he-said she-said stuff we should design some protocols where you can tell whether someone consented to send the mail or not.

Re:Hmm

[jadavis]

An employee is different than a subcontractor. A subcontractor should take the responsibility, and the "we didn't know" is a valid defense. You can enforce company policies among your eployees, but not subcontractors.

It defeats the whole purpose of a subcontractor if you have to micromanage them.

Now, if you are micromanaging a subcontractor and you encourage them to do something illegal, it may be a different story.

Also, it seems sufficient to deter us-based spamming if the person doing the spamming is held responsible for illegal spamming practices.

Re:Hmm

[tftp]

No, in civil lawsuits you go after everybody who has any relation to your problem. Unrelated people will be dropped from the suit by the judge. The reason for that is simple: it's very easy to remove someone from the lawsuit, but next to impossible to add one. So you begin with the widest audience.

Re:Hmm

[pod]

That's interesting.. when you send a mail from a windows machine, it uses its NetBIOS name as it's HELO.

Surely, this depends on the mail client? Nothing to do with Windows specifically, anyone can send anything they want as the HELO parameter. If some broken mailer chooses to use the NetBios name, then that's a client problem, not OS.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

we should design some protocols where you can tell whether someone consented to send the mail or not.

If the mail was sent, obviously someone consented to sending it. Perhaps you mean 'receive'?

Re:Hmm

[Dark$ide]

No, in civil lawsuits you go after everybody who has any relation to your problem. Unrelated people will be dropped from the suit by the judge.

I've just found the best job in the world. It's easy money. Just sit back and mail out the "Nope, not us" letters.

And the job is ...

... Lawyer for Pfizer.

By your rules every spammer caught peddling Viagra could drag Pfizer into their case.
(If that's true the American legal system is very broken. I hope that wouldn't happen here in the UK.)

Re:Hmm

[tftp]

I don't think a spammer can sue a multi-billion dollar transnational pharma empire. And on what count? Rather likely that Pfizer sues him (and wins!) for unauthorized commercial use of their trademarked name.

Actually, nobody can sue Pfizer - in civil suits loser pays court costs, and the win is not exactly guaranteed... In other words, choose your battles carefully.

But when you leave your car for restaurant's attendant to park it in a 3rd party parking lot, and he damages it, you sue the attendant (for damage), the restaurant (for hiring the attendant with bad driving skills) and the parking lot owner (for failing to provide good lighting, for example, which contributed to the accident.)

The idea is that only rarely a single event causes the problem. More often, a chain of events is needed (two cars collide at the intersection; one driver was drunk, and another was tuning his radio - both failed to see each other.) The existing laws allow you to unwind this chain of events and demand proportional compensation from anyone who contributed to your problem.

To illustrate some more. Your grocery store hires an armed guard - which happens to be a 80-year old man. You buy something, walk out. The guard shoots you, thinking that you are a robber (or whatever else daydream the guard happened to have.) You spend $10,000 in hospital and $50,000 in lost wages.

As it stands now, you can sue the guard, sure, but you also sue the store - because they were negligent on many counts. You will get $100 from the guard (he doesn't have any money), but you can get your $50,000 (and more) from the store. Without ability to sue all contributors you could only get $100 from the guard, while the major perpetrator would walk scot-free.

Re:Hmm

[Dark$ide]

To illustrate some more. Your grocery store hires an armed guard - which happens to be a 80-year old man. You buy something, walk out. The guard shoots you, thinking that you are a robber (or whatever else daydream the guard happened to have.) You spend $10,000 in hospital and $50,000 in lost wages.

We don't need armed guards on stores in the UK. We have the strictest gun laws in the Western world (even stricter than Canada). We also have free, universal healthcare.

Re:Hmm

[cloudmaster]

Good thing guns are illeagal there. Criminals, as we know, are very concerned about breaking the law. Surely someone planning to murder someone would be very worried about breaking the law by carrying a gun with them...

Re:Hmm

[Fallen_Knight]

Reminds me of "This old Whore House"...

Show how useless it is

[Lord_Dweomer]

"Hypertouch's attorney, John L. Fallat, said the CAN-SPAM Act offers little protection to the public, but they would use the few protections it offers to punish spammers."

If this case gets a lot of press coverage, it might help show people how utterly useless the CAN-SPAM act really is.

If a lawyer says its near useless, you know it must be bad. Hopefully the NY Times covers this in depth.

At least for once they are suing the company who uses the spammer and not just the spammer.

Re:Show how useless it is

[gravyfaucet]

useless. couldnt they have picked a more suitable target? Its not like Bob Villa employs cloned machines and offers to sell you a "legal" building permit, or promises "add three to five stories to your house - naturally and without a contractor". sheesh

Re:Show how useless it is

[iminplaya]

If this case gets a lot of press coverage, it might help show people how utterly useless the CAN-SPAM act really is.

Maybe it will, but when it's over, everybody will forget it like was yesterday's slashdot story. The FUD about the "benefits" of CAN-SPAM will continue to be printed every day.

Hopefully the NY Times covers this in depth.

Oh, no! Not the NY Times...I've already forgotten the last three thousand names I used to register:-)

If a lawyer says it's near useless, it's because he/she doesn't see any money in litigating the issue.

Re:Show how useless it is

[rixstep]

Good point, but it's 'spam' with a 'p', not a 'c'. Scamming is bad enough; this law - and the general objection - is about spam.

Re:Show how useless it is

[Lord_Dweomer]

'Oh, no! Not the NY Times...I've already forgotten the last three thousand names I used to register:-)"

You jest, but few on here realize the sway the NY Times holds. Many business professionals read it daily in print form. Hell, I'm a college student in Minneapolis and I have a subscription. The NY Times is one of America's biggest news sources, and that was BEFORE they had online access.

Say it ain't so!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bob Vila sending spam?!?! Next you'll be telling me Norm Abrams wants me to have a longer penis.

This Old Dot-Com

[AndroidCat]

General article on Bob Vila's ebiz

Re:This Old Dot-Com

[rixstep]

From that article:

Vila, whose wife, Diana Barrett, is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School...

Uh, where was she when hubby decided to get involved in spamming? This is very interesting...

California's tougher law still has some effect

[anonymous cowfart]

California's tough spam law is mostly preempted by the new Federal law. But not entirely. The preemption clause reads

This Act supersedes any statute, regulation, or rule of a State or political subdivision of a State that expressly regulates the use of electronic mail to send commercial messages, except to the extent that any such statute, regulation, or rule prohibits falsity or deception in any portion of a commercial electronic mail message or information attached thereto.

So for any spam that has a forged header or a misleading subject, California's new law, with the $1000 per spam penalty, will still apply. California allows private suits in small claims court by any party. So you can haul the bozos into court. Maybe even across state lines.

A year or two from now, we'll be rid of the chickenboners, but we'll be getting even more spam from "legitimate businesses".

Re:California's tougher law still has some effect

[triclipse]

You can also get attorney's fees under the California law:

"(a)(1) In addition to any other remedies provided by this article or by any other provisions of law, a recipient of an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement transmitted in violation of this article, an electronic mail service provider, or the Attorney General may bring an action against an entity that violates any provision of this article to recover either or both of the following:
(A) Actual damages.
(B) Liquidated damages of one thousand dollars ($1,000) for each unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement transmitted in violation of Section 17529.2, up to one million dollars ($1,000,000) per incident.
(2) The recipient, an electronic mail service provider, or the Attorney General, if the prevailing plaintiff, may also recover reasonable attorney's fees and costs.

California Business & Professions Code sec 17529.8

Re:California's tougher law still has some effect

[shadowbearer]

Argh. :) Too true.

Meanwhile, the lawyers are ecstatic. No job security there, nossirree bob...

SB

Re:California's tougher law still has some effect

[Steve B]

So for any spam that has a forged header or a misleading subject, California's new law, with the $1000 per spam penalty, will still apply.

Actually, any feature designed to defeat spam filtering inherently consitutes "falsity or deception" (its entire purpose makes spam appear to be non-spam). Proper enforcement of this law would give spammers the choice of insuring that their spew is trivially easy to filter or paying the penalties.

Re:fraudulent headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Fraudulent" refers not to the compliance of the headers with the e-mail protocol, but means that the headers contained information which was false.

Opportunism

[StuWho]

"Even if Hypertouch succeeds in its case, the message to spammers and the companies that hire them might not be loud enough to make a difference. The ISP is asking for $100 in damages -- the maximum allowed by the Can-Spam Act -- for each of the approximately 100 messages that it claims were sent by BlueStream Media."

Sounds like there could be money in setting up as an ISP, and sueing any spammers who use you for $100 per message. Given the millions of messages an individual spammer can send, even one victory against them would result in a cash windfall for the ISP concerned.

Re:Opportunism

[Anonymous Coward]

First you have to collect the money and pay the lawyers. $10,000 sounds like a lot, but thats assuming you get all of it and that the lawyers only take a small cut.

Who pays for the spam?

[d474]

Until they start punishing the companies that benefit from the ads this is never going to stop. It should be handled like the drug war. If your company is benefitting from ads spammed to millions of people, you go down unless you reveal who you hired to do it.

Re:Who pays for the spam?

[crackshoe]

Wait... something should be handled like the drug war? that highly succesful siphoning off of american tax dollars that accomplishes next to nothing? If it was handled as such, i wouldn't be suprised if spammers starting simply directing minors to do the actual spamming, much like the crack dealers that recruited under-age dealers because they wouldn't get the same jailtime.

Re:Who pays for the spam?

[d474]

What I mean by "being handled like the drug war" is when a small dealer/user get's busted, either they reveal their source, or do the time.

Re:Who pays for the spam?

[iminplaya]

Yes, we all know that putting people in jail for inconveniencing others is going to make the world a much better place.

Give me Convenience or give me Death -DK

Re:Who pays for the spam?

[Just Jim]

Unfortunately the 'Cruel and Unusual' clause in the Constitution prevents US juristictions from applying appropriate punishments to spammers.

Re:Who pays for the spam?

[Steve B]

Yes, we all know that putting people in jail for theft of services is going to make the world a much better place.

No charge for the fact checking.

Spammers "can" spam

[ElliotLee]

It's going to be very difficult to prove this. I could send spam and make it look like Slashdot sent it, routing it through some foreign country.

Re:Spammers "can" spam

[d474]

Yes, but in your example, Slashdot would be cleared once they reveal who they hired, the investigation goes from there.

Act may be more useful than we think

[whoever57]

There have been a lot of complaints that the CAN-SPAM acto does not make filtering easy, but, I think that bayean filters may be quite effective if trained properly.

The physical address of a spammer is more difficult to change cheaply and, if trained properly, will find it's way into bayean databases.

I guess we will see over time.

Incidentally, my mailserver (and my company's mailservers) reject any emails with "bluestreammedia.com" in the body and have done so for some time.

Re:Act may be more useful than we think

[rixstep]

s
s

Here ya go. :)

Re:Act may be more useful than we think

[jfengel]

Unfortunately, the CAN-SPAM act does not, by itself, specify how the snail-mail addresses have to be specified. I have heard (though I have not seen myself) "legitimate" spam which includes the snail-mail addresses as an image.

Similarly, the CAN-SPAM act requires UCE to be marked, but doesn't specify how, which makes filtering hard.

But it's not over. The FCC has the authority to enforce CAN-SPAM, and they are (supposedly) working on standards. Of course, any slashdotter could have come up with a workable proposal and gotten it implemented months ago, but this is proceeding at the usual pace of government.

Which means that pro-spam lobbyists are probably demanding hearings, public input, etc. to slow down implementation. But I have hope that sooner or later the FCC will finish what the CAN-SPAM act started. It won't be perfect, but it will be a start.

CAN-SPAM, Politrix, and the unsuspecting victims

[segment]

Firstly CAN-SPAM is nothing more than a political tool used by a tool this election year nothing more. For the US to claim to have made a law in places where laws mean nothing - e.g. about those pesky APNIC/LACNIC domains. Now, considering a huge portion of spam gets sent by users whose machines are infected with annoying ass viruses, what is the government going to do aside from possibly bringing in innocent victims - users whose machines were infected or rooted - to court and make them stand trial for something they didn't even know they did.

Secondly, with every Joe Blow dot com stepping on the scene, how many companies with misconfigured mail servers fall victim to going to court?

Question

[Killjoy_NL]

Ok, what if I send some US-based companies/people spam. Since I'm from the Netherlands they can't really do anything about it, right??

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Since EU voted pro OPT-IN, there is actually alot they CAN do about it. You just wait until we classify spammers as terrorists :)

great publicity

[KingJoshi]

regardless of if they win or how much (little) money they get in return, this is great publicity and it also keeps in the public limelight somewhat the issue of spam and needing better legislation. I'd assume other ISPs would sue, but I wonder which ones are making money off of the spammers...

Real Time Filters

[d474]

Couldn't huge email centers (yahoo, msn, etc.) in real time compare source IP's from all emails moving into their systems, identify SPAM as massive amounts of identical email coming from identical IP addresses, load that data into a filter and then block? Some would always get through, say 100,000 but the rest of the 1.4 million get blocked? Isn't anything like this possible?

Re:Real Time Filters

[Anonymous Coward]

They do this already: you are only seeing the percentage that gets through.

Re:Real Time Filters

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL does this.. for some time now.

Re:Real Time Filters

[bill_mcgonigle]

identify SPAM as massive amounts of identical email coming from identical IP addresses, load that data into a filter and then block?

Two things make this difficult:
1) zombies - many of the trojans install spam-sending zombies so the IP addresses are different
2) random nonsense is inserted into consequitive spams to make the non-identical

Of course filters are getting better and no doubt will deal with these techniques in the ever-escalating arms race that is spam.

Re:CAN-SPAM, Politrix, and the unsuspecting victim

[Anonymous Coward]

Misunderestimated is a perfectly valid word. It means to incorrectly minimize.

Spammers must die!

[Dadoken]

So how do I find a good anti-spammer lawyer to initiate some lawsuits and cash in on the 30 spamm I receive a day from forged address? I try to bounce as many as possible, but most are fake email. I even got a UCE from one of my OWN email address, so I know they are harvesting as fast as possible.

Re:Spammers must die!

[Simple-Simmian]

Only one?

I have got 10 at least from 5 different domains I own in the last 365 days or so. 4 don't have any email server or valid addys associated with them. I am the only user with a vailid email account on the other, not nice to see UCE ariving from that domain :(

I got one from such an address with a nice Microsoft exploit/trojan last week. To bad my desktop machine is Mandrake 9.2. :p

I think castration is too good for spammers.

Hah!

[niko9]

I can see the Warden welcoming Bob Villa to the big house: "Welcome to this old Penitentiary"

Re:Hah!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Here's your cellmate... around here, we like to call 'er 'Martha'."

Re:Hah!

[iminplaya]

He can bunk with "Tim Taylor"

The idea here

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember: If the U.S. can get to the point that all spam is coming into the U.S. from the outside, that is a major win.

The idea here is to increase the accuracy of filter-based spam fighting techniques. If we can assume-- because the CAN-SPAM act requires it-- that e-mails sent within the U.S. have accurate header information, we can set up much stronger e-mail filters based on that assumption.

We can't assume email from the netherlands has this assumption, but this just means that these filters are going to increase in higher false positive rates on the spam filters.

The hope and assumption is that NLian businesses will start complaining to the netherlandese government that they want something like the CAN-SPAM act too, so that email from the Netherlands to the U.S. can be "trusted" and thus less likely to be labelled spam.

you can be sure...

[Roger Keith Barrett]

...than Bob Vila isn't personally involved. Ever watch "This Old House"? The guy never does ANY projects himself. He always passes it off to that other guy! "Hi, I am Bob Vila for Sears Bulk Mail Services. For just $19.95...."

Re:you can be sure...

[LostCluster]

The problem is, one of the co-defendants is BVWebTies LLC. That's his company, he's the "BV" in that name.

So, whether he made the decision or not, he's responsible because he owns at least a good chunk of the company that the decision maker was acting on behalf of.

Re:you can be sure...

[Roger Keith Barrett]

sorry... I guess I should have surrounded my comment with tags.

Re:you can be sure...

[Roger Keith Barrett]

tags that is...

Re:CAN-SPAM, Politrix, and the unsuspecting victim

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, considering a huge portion of spam gets sent by users whose machines are infected with annoying ass viruses, what is the government going to do aside from possibly bringing in innocent victims - users whose machines were infected or rooted - to court and make them stand trial for something they didn't even know they did.

They can sue the person the spam mail was sent on behalf of, and subpeona the names of the actual spammers, then charge them with hacking the computers used to send the spam.

For it to be spam, someone has to be selling something. If someone is selling something logically they can be tracked down, because how else are they supposed to get the money?

I wonder whose cell would be nicer...

[Toxygen]

...Bob Vila's or Martha Stewart?

Re:I wonder whose cell would be nicer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's do a reality TV show where they renovate/decorate each other's cells!

Re:I wonder whose cell would be nicer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Better still, let's do a show in which they become gay!

Oh, that happens in prison already?

Re:I wonder whose cell would be nicer...

[shadowbearer]

Well, one would have nice toilet doilies, and the other would have a working toilet. Which one would *you* rather be in? :)

sorry, I hadda do it

SB

Re:I wonder whose cell would be nicer...

[Felinoid]

Bob Vila will get a fat fine and zero jail time so the question is moot.

Anyway they'd never let a prisoner have carpentry tools where as Martha Stewart could create her own tools.

Re:I wonder whose cell would be nicer...

[annielaurie]

Right. Martha would have the working toilet, since Bob Vila probably doesn't know one end of a plunger from the other. Bob's would have toilet doilies sent to him as a gesture of sympathy from our good friends at Sears.

(Does Craftsman have a crochet hook in their line of tools? I do remember that they had a ready supply of 10 and 15 Torx drivers when they were needed to get into a Compaq box. I haven't thought about that in years, but when I needed them and couldn't find them, I got them at Sears.)

Re:I wonder whose cell would be nicer...

[shadowbearer]

LOL.

Mod parent up...

I don't know about Craftsman...haven't bought in years, don't have a catalog around. I think there's an online one tho :)

SB

How long before a decent set of laws/legislation

[Un0r1g1nal]

At the end of the day, we can only continue to hope that as more and more of these cases are highlighted, that the people that are supposed to represent us in government decide to pull their fingers out and put in some proper laws with proper penalties. If all companies that used spammers to advertise their company were fined and repeat offenders given jail sentences, how long before these unscrupulous companies stopped using spammers. And of course as mentioned above, very heavy penalties for hiding the actual identities of spammers

Re:CAN-SPAM, Politrix, and the unsuspecting victim

[segment]

and subpeona the names of the actual spammers, then charge them with hacking the computers used to send the spam Did you miss something I posted? Again if someone has their machine broken into, how the hell are they supposed to find out who it was that broke into it if they didn't know how to protect it from the jump? As for your subpoena point, makes little sense, again what are you going to do if Shaka Zulu from Niger broke into your machine, go searching for him? Sure waste 2million tax dollars as opposed to just chalking up what a $ .0002 spam sent. Instead of attacking the endusers, they should be going after the companies who are selling the products being offered. That would definitely stop it, going after an end user does nothing, besides the gov is liable to falsely prosecute some innocent joe shmoe. If you think it won't happen look at what the RIAA did to 80 year olds who never even heard of an MP3. Same players different issue

FYI: lawsuit homepage...

[Joe Wagner]

Hi All, Just FYI, We will be posting updates to the case as they happen at http://legal.hypertouch.com. We think the CAN-SPAM Act is an open license to spam with very little protection for the public, but we are attempting to use what few protections are available to punish some unrepentant spammers.

One of the biggest problems with CAN-SPAM Act that we are hoping to educate the press so they can inform the public is that the Act says end users _must_ contact each spammer and opt-out. This is of course exactly the opposite of what ISPs have been tell their customers to do. "Opting out" merely gives the spammer have a live address. Some of the email addresses defendants sent spam to were unique addresses submitted to a "virus software 90 % off" spam. In no uncertain terms, "opting out" of spam signs you up for more spam.

We were surprised when even after we told BobVila.com about the quality of the lists their hired spammer was using, they still refused even just to promise they'd never use BlueStream Media again... Right before we filed the action, one of our users received a new BobVila spam, this time sent through a Florida based spammer.

Re:FYI: lawsuit homepage...

[triclipse]

Why didn't you sue in California state court and allege both the Fed and State law?

Bob Vila is more or less fictional...

[LostCluster]

Yeah, he does exist and that is his real name. However, his association with home improvement is purely a creation of television.

He was a nobody until a PBS series called This Old House came along in 1979. He was hired as the host of that show. His job duties there were to read the opening and closing sequence lines, and to interview the experts who really did know what they were doing. He was not one of those experts, he was just asked questions to the experts.

In 1989, when he left This Old House, he created his own TV production company, and used his association with home improvement to get endorcement deals. His primary sponsor is Sears, and his Home Again series can more or less be seen as a Sears infomerical at times. (Sears has always been a title sponsor, and controls a large chunk of the ad space within the program. The content portion of the show might not hit you over the head as an ad, but notice the clear bias when it comes time to select which company's products to work with.)

His primary line of work these days isn't as a home improvement expert, it's in being the pitch man for Craftsman tools and other Sears brands. He'll endorse other products too, but that's really the only skill people pay him for. You never see him doing any of the work on his TV shows, and that's for good reason...

Re:Bob Vila is more or less fictional...

[Anonymous Coward]

He was a nobody until a PBS series called This Old House came along in 1979. He was hired as the host of that show. His job duties there were to read the opening and closing sequence lines, and to interview the experts who really did know what they were doing. He was not one of those experts, he was just asked questions to the experts.

So he can't even say, "I'm not a home handyman, but I play one on TV." he's just the host :)

Re:Bob Vila is more or less fictional...

[AndroidCat]

His primary sponsor is Sears

From a Dec 2001 article:

Bobvila.com was initially a joint venture with Sears, which held a majority interest. But that relationship ended earlier this year when Sears, no longer enamored of the Internet, unceremoniously pulled out.

Perhaps that's when the slide to the spammy side started?

Re:Bob Vila is more or less fictional...

[annielaurie]

As I recall, he was asked by PBS to leave "This Old House" because of the increasing amount of time he was spending promoting the Sears Craftsman tools. It was too much commercial identity for the "non-commercial" PBS.

Re:Bob Vila is more or less fictional...

[bill_mcgonigle]

He was a nobody until a PBS series called This Old House came along in 1979. He was hired as the host of that show. His job duties there were to read the opening and closing sequence lines, and to interview the experts who really did know what they were doing. He was not one of those experts, he was just asked questions to the experts.

I'm no fan of Bob Vila, but if you were on job sites for 10 years asking questions of experts all that time, you'd be bound to learn a thing or two about homebuilding.

I'm just glad we've got Kevin O'Connor now - he's easily the best host they've had. Norm and Tommy even seem to like him - now that's a change!

Yes....

[www.sorehands.com]

In many states, there were laws that made using false headers a violation of that state's laws. In addition many states have advertising laws which require the advertiser to be identified.

What else is new?

[Guppy06]

Fraud isn't something new to Bob Vila. He pretends to be a carpenter all the time.

Seriously, ever notice that he does nothing but talk to the people doing the work, and the few times he actually picks up a tool he even makes me seem coordinated?

A while ago some friends and I caught an old episode of This Old House when Vila was still on it, and in this particular episode he was talking to Norm Abram as he was putting on some wooden shingles. Bob decided to show show his ineptness by putting up a few himself. Comparing the two would have been sad if it hadn't been so damned funny...

Re:What else is new?

[LostCluster]

This is in part why the This Old House Classics that run on commerical channels are only from the post-1989 seasons after Vila left the show, the first 10 seasons are something WGBH would rather forget.

Vila was not hired because he knew about construction. He was hired because he looked credible, and could speak well to the camera. He was the host of the show, and that's it.

Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

For the most trivial example which you have cited, if you try to admit spam as evidence in court, and it's labelled as coming from slashdot.org, but the Recieved: smtp routing headers show that it came from somewhere outside the U.S., it should be pretty obvious that slashdot.org did not send that letter, and someone just forged the slashdot.org return address, since slashdot.org is located, well, inside the U.S..

Will it help any?

[Bagheera]

It's nice to see someone at least trying to get something from this Law, since it did such a good job of crippling the stricter state level laws. While I agree that a single national level law is a good idea, they took it in the shorts with this one. CAN-SPAM was a waste of paper.

The sad thing is during a recent review of my spam trap account (11800+ email in 3 months) a grand total of 30 of them were from "legitimate" business. The rest were for your usual run of penis pills, bad mortgages, "Stop spam now" software, and herbal vi@gra.

Now, if I could collect on each and every one of them, I'd be a wealthy man. But the vast majority are coming in through open proxies or trojaned Windows boxen, and are annoyingly difficult to track back to their source - which is often off-shore and out of reach of the CAN-SPAM act in any case.

Going after a legitimate" company like this is may put a slight damper on SPAM sent by "real" companies, but it does little or nothing to stem the flood tide of crap we get from the low lifes who are at the root of the problem.

Re:Will it help any?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a start, though.

One problem we have in lobbying against spam at all levels is the perception, created and blurred by scum like the DMA, that there is such a thing as "legitimate" mass unsolicited e-mail marketing.

If we can ever destroy that myth, we'll be one step closer to a clear, unambiguous legal recognition that "spam is bad, period".

foster city

[Anonymous Coward]

about time Foster City (my hometown) made the news, even if it is just slashdot!

feel free to mod me into oblivion now

Re:foster city

[Joe Wagner]

It appears that one of BlueStream Media's customers is also in Foster City, DrySkinOnly.com... Small world. The local DA is taking complaints about spam, though you have to get through a disinterested police force. If you have any pre-2004 spam that has no ADV label, that is punishable under the old CA law by up to one year in jail. If you have the time and energy, file a complaint and follow up on it...

Windows: the (un)suspecting victim

[mousse-man]

I think running Windows is already legally aiding and abetting spamming. I wonder whether this is punishable...

Re:CAN-SPAM, Politrix, and the unsuspecting victim

[Anonymous Coward]

who it was that broke into it

I am suggesting that they would subpeona the end person who hired the people to break into it. I.E. the person selling the product or service advertised in the spam.

Obviously this isn't going to do much good if this person is some kind of crime organization running a scam out of nigeria or something. However, it's not like 100% of spam is sent by organizations performing scams in countries which are unwilling to cooperate with a fraud investigation in the U.S.. I would say we could take a serious bite out of spam just by preventing those persons selling products or services within those countries with relative degree of law-enforcement cooperation with the U.S. from sending spam within the U.S. using spammers who operate under illegitimate practices.

Just imagine for a sec

[st0rmshad0w]

Imagine the sweet livin on the cell block with Bob and Martha!

Wow. The mind boggles.

Prolly never would have happened if Norm were still on board.

Re:Just imagine for a sec

[Anonymous Coward]

Norm is still on board...Bob is the one who had to leave This Old House and start again. The producers fired Bob after he was found to be endorsing products outside the show, without the producer's consent.

Also, hasn't anyone seen Bob Vila hawking the "Internet business toolkit" on late-night infomercials? The kit supposedly contains everything you need to start a successful internet business from the comfort of your own home?

ignorant businesses

[DavidDeLux]

Only yesterday I got some UCE from a local company... a nice large PDF file containing details of a promo they were doing for photocopiers. This company clearly think its OK to send out such junk... whilst they included in the message their email address to request to get off their list, the replyto address was a placebo... so for that alone they're breaking the acceptable use policy of the ISP that they sent from... who got a suitable complaint from me (and I hope they yank their account!). Now, this company were using some software to bulk send these messages (pdfmail)... and they harvested my email address from somewhere. You would have thought that by now comapnies would know better than to send out SPAM/UCE.. in my case the company sent crap themselves, so they can't even blame some unscrupulous marketing company.

Re:CAN-SPAM, Politrix, and the unsuspecting victim

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no way to prove that the company being advertised has anything connection to the SPAM: same reason illegal fly posting still happens.

My seemingly obvious method of getting rid of spam

[Killswitch1968]

What I never understood is instead of going after the spammers, can't we go after the companies hiring the spammers? They would be far easier to track down. They must have websites to solicite their garbage, with credit card payments and lots of contact info.
I can see the potential for people to 'fake-spam' and get a company into trouble, but is this the only problem?

Re:The big question is ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Overrated - clever moderator

Re:fraudulent headers?

[HrothgarReborn]

I hate spam as much as anyone but this is true. We are talking about somebody put some 1's and 0's where they shouldn't. Is this really a crime? I'm not even sure its a violation of an RFC.

No attempt was made to destroy or steal anything. Even the theft of bandwidth is comical. Compared to how most /.ers feel about how copyright violation doesn't really hurt the artist very much, aren't we being just a bit hypocritcal when we say we should sue people who just bug us?

Let's jump off this litigation wagon for such trivial problems and start working on a way to make something like digital signatures work.

One caviat. People who send obscene unrequested emails are in a different catagory. With them you can actually show they are violating peoples rights as much as any flasher in the park.

ok

[No. 24601]

... CAN-SPAM Act offers little protection to the public.

Ya, pretty surprising! Who was the genius who decided to call it CAN-SPAM.

why bother?

[themusicgod1]

obviously you are too ugly/geeky/annoying for said girls, and if you force them to give you their phone numbers they are just going to ignore you anyways. leave these women alone, no matter how much you need to get laid.

Re:why bother?

[pyrrhonist]

obviously you are too ugly/geeky/annoying for said girls, and if you force them to give you their phone numbers they are just going to ignore you anyways. leave these women alone, no matter how much you need to get laid.

Nice troll. It's not going work, though.

Let's put a spin on this slightly.

[Ayanami Rei]

I don't like the CAN-SPAM act at all.

BUT... it is somewhat satisfying to use it against them, ridding the Internet of another vaccous marketing firm, regardless of the circumstances.

In an ideal world, my upstream mail relay would reject all email that wasn't signed, and I'd have all my friends keys on my keyring.

But I will have to settle for this...

I mean, does anyone cry if a slashdot troll dies? I know I wouldn't.

OMG!

[schon]

He was a nobody until a PBS series called This Old House came along in 1979. He was hired as the host of that show. His job duties there were to read the opening and closing sequence lines, and to interview the experts who really did know what they were doing. He was not one of those experts, he was just asked questions to the experts.

Oh my god! You mean something on television isn't what it seemed?!?!?!

We have to let people know this. Shout it from the rooftops people! Make sure everybody you see knows that TV isn't real.

Re:OMG!

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you don't get the History Channel or Discovery. Turn off your reality shows dude. There is more on television than your daily pretendings on Oxygenlike channels. If you must choose from the no-brain channels, you should research Cold Fusion or something more constructive instead. Each second you spend is a second not coming back. Clay Aiken is NOT coming to visit you and in all likelyhood, doesn't know you exist.

The parent's post seems solid, although I haven't researched it myself.

Re:fraudulent headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Information contained inside headers can only be "false" if they were meant to be taken seriously in the first place. But they were not.

HELO behavior and greylisting

[Frater 219]

a) SMTP HELO's with names whose IP addresses don't match the originating IP

That's interesting.. when you send a mail from a windows machine, it uses its NetBIOS name as it's HELO.

... Well, my mail server does not need to be receiving mail from remote Windows client systems. Windows mail servers, yes, but presumably those can follow the protocol and HELO with their real name, not their Microsoft made-up toy name.

Indeed, I might be willing to discriminatorily greylist all mail from any remote Windows system. (Greylisting: Sending a 4xx temporary failure the first time a host tries to send mail to a particular recipient. This causes a normal MTA to retry in a few minutes, but fire-and-forget spamware and worms generally abort.)

How to apply this to Windows only? OpenBSD's passive OS fingerprinting would be a start. It allows one to selectively redirect traffic based on the detected OS, and thus to offer different quality of service based on the quality of the client system. Since there is a much greater likelihood that a given Windows host's connection to my MTA is delivering spam and worms than that a given Solaris or Red Hat host is delivering spam and worms, there is a good reason to deteriorate service (as by greylisting) for Windows hosts -- as long as it can be done in a way which retains (eventual) delivery of real mail.

If Unix mail server admins all chose to greylist remote Windows hosts -- including Windows MTAs as well as client hosts -- then Windows servers would eat the cost of keeping messages in queue during the greylisting period. This would, effectively, be the cost of proving you're a real Windows MTA, not a worm or spamware. This lays part of the burden of the Windows system's susceptibility to malware back upon those responsible for it (deployers of Windows) whereas currently they are able to offload it upon the rest of us in the form of junk mail from worms.

(Incidentally, yes, the majority of mail exchangers run some form of Unix. Less than half, however, run Sendmail.)

How we need to use the law...

[webweave]

Distributed legal actions could be carried out by masses of ISPs all with the their own records against one spammer ALL AT THE SAME TIME. 10 bucks per spam does not sound like a bad penalty when divided over thousands of ISPs and court cases.

Funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, if you have to say that it's funny. Well, that precludes the possibility that it's actually funny.

Of course, if all of us in North America didn't have to listen to jokes about this from Jay Leno and Dave Letterman for 4 straight years, it may have still been worth a chuckle or two.

What I'm saying here, is I had hoped that Clinton Sex Jokes had finally died out.

Tracking Spammers

[Detritus]

One way to find out the identity of the spammers is to follow the money. Someone with the power to issue subpoenas should be able to find out where the money is going. An old trick is to write a check to the person under investigation and see where it goes.

BobVila.com has posted a reply...

[Joe Wagner]

BobVila.com's reply can be found here and says:

The following statement is released by Jack Hill, chief executive officer of BVWebTies LLC, owner of BobVila.com, in response to media inquiries involving the anti-spam lawsuit against BVWebTies LLC filed by Hypertouch Inc.:

BOSTON (March 5, 2004) - "BVWebTies LLC, owner of BobVila.com, takes the issue of junk e-mail seriously and believes it has operated in full compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. We remain committed to respecting and serving our customers. We were shocked by this action, and believe that BVWebTies will show that it operated in good faith and in full compliance with existing law."

Re:My seemingly obvious method of getting rid of s

[mabu]

What companies? Most of the spam is affilliate crap. Which further emphasizes the fact that 99% of spamming isn't profitable when you send out millions of messages on the premise that maybe it might bring you a commission.

HELO HOMECOMPUTER

[csk_1975]

After noticing all the spam sent from machines using uppercase non qualified HELO names I hacked our SMTP listener to trap all the mail sent from them.

I did this in November and so far its trapped tens of thousands of spam mails and less than ten valid mailers. Of these valid mailers, two said they had no idea they were using these names and promptly changed them to FQDNs, one was not happy, and the others didn't respond to my messages so their mail is still trapped/refused - my users didn't want the mail from them anyway so its really no loss.

I'd recommend blocking HELO NETBIOS-NAME for incoming mail as it stops heaps of spam with very little impact on valid mail.

Hmm Huh Om

[coyotedata]

The Bob vila is suddenly ignorant defence

Re:My seemingly obvious method of getting rid of s

[Animats]

That's why the Direct Marketing Association lobbied so hard for the CAN-SPAM act. A California law that did just that was going into effect on January 1, 2004. That had the spam industry really scared.

Respectability in a relative sense

[Flexagon]

Well, IIRC, on the very first This Old House show, he personally began demolition without goggles or turning off the power. On the second show, he had to take lumps from a viewer letter that pointed this out. I've been similarly unimpressed with many of his techniques since. His current Home Again show is filled with explicit product name references and long verbal lists of marketing feature/benefit bullets associated with them. It's crossed way over the line to an infomercial, and thus is worthless to me. Add to these his leaving This Old House after conflicting himself by signing up to sell for Sears.

So to me, he has a long history of wreckless overpromotion. So if his company's chosen a spammer to promote itself, intentionally or not, I'd certainly be disgusted but I wouldn't be too surprised.

Re:fraudulent headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

No attempt was made to destroy or steal anything. ... Compared to how most /.ers feel about how copyright violation doesn't really hurt the artist very much, aren't we being just a bit hypocritcal when we say we should sue people who just bug us?

They were trying to sell something. Once you begin committing acts of commerce, you are operating under a different set of rules. This is logical both from a legal and moral standpoint.

If you send someone a letter in the U.S. mail claiming to be someone other than whom you are and offering to sell them something, you are committing mail fraud under the law. This is just ink on paper. Do you think this should really a crime?

Even the theft of bandwidth is comical.

Look at the statistics sometime for exactly how much bandwidth is used up, how much time is spent cleaning up bounced mails from, and how much time is spent dealing with, tracing, attempting to block, and dealing with hack attempts related to, spam. You will no longer make statements like that.

Trivial?

[Simple-Simmian]

Why don't you give an example of how "trivial" finding out where the forged headers actually come from is. The headers might show it being rxed at some external mail server but in fact will not be a reliable indication of where it actually originated (which I bet is in the good old USoA)

castration isn't good enough for spammers

.

An offtopic troll from an AC without a reply is..

[Anonymous Coward]

is like an offtopic troll from an AC without a reply.

Re:fraudulent headers?

[JuggleGeek]

I hate spam as much as anyone but this is true. We are talking about somebody put some 1's and 0's where they shouldn't. Is this really a crime? I'm not even sure its a violation of an RFC.

You are arguing that sending spam with forged headers is OK, and still believe that you hate spam as much as anyone? You aren't paying attention. I guarantee that I hate it more than you do - that's why I'm not arguing that spam is OK. (Much less spam with forged headers.)

Re:fraudulent headers?

[HrothgarReborn]

Twist not my words. I am arguing that it does not appear to be a crime, not that it is OK. Many people do things that I do not find to be OK but that does not mean they do not have the right to do them.

This is the difference between a police state and a free country.

To outlaw something, you usually need to show that someone is violating someone elses rights, not simply excersizing their own. A mail system by nature invites all comers. Unless someone was obscene, offering a false product, or threatening (all of which are already addressed by other laws), there is no crime in sending an email saying "come check out my sight" even if done anonymously or with a false identity.

that was not a troll[nt]

[themusicgod1]

[nt]

Re:fraudulent headers?

[Steve B]

We are talking about somebody put some 1's and 0's where they shouldn't. Is this really a crime?

Yes, if it's done with the intent of gaining unauthorized access to other people's property (e.g. computer cracking, evasion of spam filtering, fraudulent electronic bank transactions, etc).

Re:fraudulent headers?

[Steve B]

To outlaw something, you usually need to show that someone is violating someone elses rights

My computer and ISP are my private property. You are not authorized to use them for spamming. QED.

A mail system by nature invites all comers.

Nope, any more than a front door by nature invites all comers. It is long overdue for the law to treat circumvention of spam filtering as severely as it treats the meatspace version of breaking and entering.

Re:fraudulent headers?

[HrothgarReborn]

Against my better judgement I will continue this thread

My computer and ISP are my private property.
Damn, won't your ISP be surprised to learn they are your property. As far as your computer, don't hit the get mail button unless you want to actually get mail. If you are not accepting all comers then you have a white list and therefore won't need to worry about spam.

Nope, any more than a front door by nature invites all comers.
A better analogy would be a mail slot on your front door, or your door knob where people can hang a flyer, or your mailbox were you get all hard copy spam that is little different than its electronic cousin. Lets not pretend someone sending you an unwanted email somehow violates your privacy to any greater extent.

Again, I am not defending obscene, virus laden, or scamming emails.
I find spam very annoying. I have setup a number of spam filters to combat the situation. I have talked my conpany out of using it for marketing. But I cannot hold that sending an unwanted email is illegal, even if it has masked the headers. Let's save our laws for things that are important.
Now that I say that, maybe I should save my /. karma for things that are important as well. I am through defending this one.

Having our cake and eating it too?

[clubin]

That's an interesting deviation from the normal point of view. Perhaps we /should/ be thinking of the internet as just another part of life, but I would find your claim that "we" /do/ to be quite wrong. Rather than exclusively following logic, the /. crowd, on this point, seems to follow whatever suits them best in the particular case, whether it aligns with logic or not.

On this point crowds might rally behind the idea that the internet is just like any other part of life; sure, since that would make forged spam mail headers fraud. That suits them. But when the discussion turns to bringing regulations existent in the non-internet world to their internet counterparts in ways that just might cost the aforementioned crowd more than the free ride they're enjoying now, the point of view seems to change. "What's that? The FCC wants to treat VoIP like landline networks?! Absurd! It's just bits over a pipe! It's the freedom from such regulations that allowed the internet to grow to what it is now...," would go a typical response-- or something like that. "What? But I'm doing _____ on the /internet/; I shouldn't be held to the same consequences as in real world," might go another response to such an issue (taxing, perhaps?). On any other day, when one of the crowd's freedoms from responsibility aren't being revoked, the crowd would be insightful enough to realize that just about anything could be generalized as "just bits over a pipe", including the less-as-obvious-since-it's-not-a-multipurpose-comp uter landline telephones they use or that the internet /is/ the real world and thusly should bare upon it's users the same responsibilities.

I'm not telling you (/.) which point of view you should hold, but I still have a point to make: stop fucking contradicting yourselves already! Please? :]

excersising futility in responding to a two-day old post,
yours truly,
Corey

Re:Having our cake and eating it too?

[Tango42]

You make an interesting point. It is human nature to say what suits you best, but that doesn't make it logical, you're right. I guess it's more a matter of the regulations for the real world are wrong, so /.ers aren't saying the rules should be different on the net than in the real world, but that they should be the same on both, but just different from what they currently are in the real world. The other issue is that real world rules are made by countries, but the net is international (ie. You don't like the US regulations, you simply base your server in the UK, and you can (sometimes) get round it).

Re:fraudulent headers?

[Steve B]

If you are not accepting all comers then you have a white list

Wrong. A spam filter is a refusal to accept email from all comers. The evasion of a spam filter is deliberate (because the use of any filter evasion technique is prima facie proof that the mailer knew that his message had been prohibited by at least some recipients) trespass.

A better analogy would be....

Nope; my analogy is the correct one. You either believe in private property rights or you don't; I do, therefore I understand that spammers are trespassers deserving of the usual punishment for that offense.

But I cannot hold that sending an unwanted email is illegal, even if it has masked the headers.

Sure you can. All you have to do is think it through rationally.

The use of filter-evasion techniques to get spam into a mailbox is equivalent to the use of a disguise to enter private property after being told to stay off. It is obvious that the latter is, and should be, illegal. QED.