Spam and the Law Conference Report

Cowards Anonymous writes "The Guardian has a story about a spam and law conference, recently held by the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, in San Francisco. The conferences are usually attended by anti-spammers, from the major ISPs, and spammers; and are an attempt to bring the two sides together. The article's author notes 'It's oddly intimate, watching the spammers and the anti-spammers mill around each other like this. It feels like a temporary ceasefire in a vicious war that to most of us seems to be a stalemate.' Also in attendance was infamous spammer Scott Richter, or 'high volume email deployer' as he wished to be called on his recent Daily Show appearance. Surprisingly the anti-spammers didn't tear Richter to pieces with their bare hands."

Comments

Re:What i do with spam

[ObjetDart]

I don't understand...what good does this do? Virtually all reply-to email addresses in spam are bogus. The only thing in the entire message that is real is the link to the site they are promoting. If you want to DOS the spammer, go after the site, not the bogus email address.

Re:What i do with spam

[baryon351]

i let it gather to about 100 emails in my inbox, then i forward each of them individually to every address that sent it.

No you don't. You don't know the address that sent your spams.

All you can do is reply to some forged address that the spammer wants you to think the email is from.

Bittorrent of Daily Show Stuffs

[ticklemeozmo]

The Daily Show - 03.30.04 (Xvid) [87 MB] Torrent

Re:How to avoid spam.

[Caseylite]

Even better: Have a domain. When you own a domain, you can forward all mail not addressed to a valid email address into a common mailbox. I give email addresses based on who I am giving them too, for example: yahoo-list@... microsoft-seminars@... symantec@... When/if I get spam to an address, it is much easier to figure where the leak was. Once an address is completely compromised, I create an actual mailbox for that address, set a size limit of 1, and let the messages bounce.

Re:Jesus Christ People.

[shostiru]

The first amendment does not guarantee that I have the right to say what I wish to you and make you pay for it. The cost of junk mail, telemarketing, etc. is paid by the sender. The cost of email is paid primarily by the recipient (and her or his ISP). And, of course, there is substantial precedent that limiting commercial speech is constitutional.

Oh, and your estimates of the waste of energy involved in spam are off by several orders of magnitude. Back of envelope calculations based on incoming mail volume, power consumption (which I've measured), and cluster size has 100,000 emails per day costing at least 10KWhr, and that's just on the receiving mail server cluster (it would be lower without redundancy, of course). Once you add in the sender and all intermediate hops I wouldn't be surprised if that figure doubled. And that's just the beginning; of all network services we run, email is by far the greatest suck of money, brains, and time.

Before you claim free speech in defense of spam again, perhaps you should spend some quality time with systems and network engineers, and see how un-free this "free speech" really is. I'd be glad to do so myself over the telephone ... I assume given your argument you do take collect calls from everyone, right?

Re:What i do with spam

[JuggleGeek]

You are abusing innocent people, and are causing just as much trouble as the spammers. You're no better than a spammer, from where I sit.