Austria Bans Spam

Dan Kegel writes "PC Welt reports the Justice Committee of Austria's Parliament has decided to ban spam. Commercial e-mail in Austria must go only to people who have opted in. Violations are to be punished with a large fine. The new law presumably still needs to be approved by the full house. Seen in the German Linux site LinuxTicker.com. " Der Webpage ist auf Deutsch. Use Babelfish. I suspect the only way we'll kill spam is if we start charging a penny per email or something, but thats a bummer of a solution. I'd settle for simply requiring unsolicited emails to say in the subject that they were spam.

Comments

Broadband will make Spam a Huge Burden

[Gorphrim]

Right now many of us are still stuck on 56K (and slower) modems. When broadband ramps up I assume spammers will begin to attach/embed pix and movie files in their emails. Assuming I've got two or three of those waiting on the server, next time I check my email I could be waiting 5, 10, or even 30 minutes just to get through to the legitimate emails. I'm not quite sure of the best remedy, but the unsolicited spam fines seems like a good start.

Send it back

[Farce Pest]

I'm the double-bounce postmaster for over a thousand domains, so I get a lot of spam that bounces (because the recipient doesn't exist) and then bounces again (because the envelope sender is bogus). In the last month or so, the spammers have shifted heavily back to using multiple relays. I report these to ORBS and lately RRSS. We don't filter based on these lists, in the usual sense, but we do use them for "quality-of-service". I.e. the more lists you are on, the worse your service gets, and the more your queue backs up...

Once upon a time I would notify relay postmasters that their relays were open and that they should fix them. That became impractical, so now I'm taking another approach: If I get a double bounced spam that has come from a host listed on ORBS, RRSS, or IMRSS, I have a script that automagically sends it back to the relay's postmaster. This doesn't always work; some of those hosts don't have a postmaster address, or won't accept mail for their own IP. Most of the time it works. This tends to magically break language barriers and soon thereafter the relays seem to close up, or at least I stop getting spam from them.

So, if you have the bandwidth to pull this off, make your postmaster policy "return to sender": Send undeliverable spam back to the relay. And report open relays to one or more of the above lists. I report 30-70 relays a DAY, which probably makes it relatively expensive to spam us. Who are we? HA! Keep guessing, spammers...

Litigation?

[scriptkiddie]

I live in Seattle, where for over a year now there has been a US$500 fine for any spammer who sent mail to an address in Washington state. The law seems to work: I haven't received ANY spam on any of my local e-mail accounts, and it's really nice to be able to give sites my address and use anon FTP with relative security. Unfortunately, (I'm not a legal wiz so I might be wrong on this) the law defines spam as any e-mail with a FALSE RETURN ADDRESS.

Obviously this leads to complications- what if I send mail with my friend's return address? What if I send out a million e-mails with my real address (and somehow claim they were not unsolicited)? I run a small Linux box that serves shell accounts to about 30 students. On the web site, I have a simple PHP3 script which allows visitors to click on any user and send an e-mail. Of course, a Web site can't determine the sender's address, so I ask senders to type it in. Since this mail is technically sent from my server, what happens if somebody clicks on a user's name, types in a false return address, and sends it? Even though the script can only send mail to users on that box, I might be exposing myself to liability. I haven't recieved any fines yet, and I doubt that I will, but I can only hope that mailers type in their real address. (P.S. No, we don't have open relays!)

I am a member of the Seattle FreeBSD Users' Group, aka Seafug, mailing list. Recently some spam got through our cleverly designed procmail filters (I don't know how, it was now supposed to). Even though the spammer never got our individual e-mail addies, the spam was sent to all of us. To complicate the story, the actual server box is in fact the infamous dub.net, colocated somewhere fancy in Tucson. So although the spammer had an address that was in Tucson, the messages reached a few dozen people in Seattle.

I think our spam laws are remarkably well designed, considering that th people who wrote them were civil servants annoyed that their SMTP servers were crashing, not expert hackers. But I think any legal solution to the problem is inevitably bound to have loopholes. That's why we need a technical solution to the problem - certificates would work, but a decent way for users to configure mail filtering from a client would be nice too.