Spammers Can Go To Jail

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/30/technology/30SPAM.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/30/technology/30SPAM.html</a><br /><br />I know this is <i>really</i> off topic, but lately I've seen spam impact how people use their mobile devices. On more than one occassion, I've seen users remove email accounts from their mobile device because the volume of spam just costs too much over GPRS or is too slow over anything but WiFi, and even then it takes up precious RAM. :evil: <br /><br />Virginia has passed a law making spam sent by fraud a felony. "The new statute adds criminal penalties for fraudulent, high-volume spammers. It outlaws practices like forging the return address line of an e-mail message or hacking a computer to send spam surreptitiously. Those found guilty of sending more than 10,000 such deceptive e-mail messages in one day would be subject to a prison term of one to five years and forfeiture of profits and assets connected with these activities."<br /><br /> :spam: <br /><br />Nice to have the law but let's see how they enforce it. I haven't read the details yet, but I am wondering if just setting your spam-thrower to only send 9,999 messages a day will keep you out of the reach of this law? And what is one email, a message sent to one recepient or BCC'd to 50,000 users?<br /><br />Note that the above site may require a free registration at the NY Times site.

[racerx]

I find this very interested considering that it is Virginia that has passed the law - home of AOL. Should be interesting to see how many convictions they get out of this one...

[rlobrecht]

I find this very interested considering that it is Virginia that has passed the law - home of AOL. Should be interesting to see how many convictions they get out of this one...

The bill was signed at the AOL headquarters.

[Jacob]

I read about it and I also have serious questions about how this can be enforced.

I'm hoping it'll be effective - I don't get email on my PPC, but I'm definitely thinking of adding that kind of capabilities in the future.

[rubberdemon]

I've got the T-Mobile PPCPE, and I'm seriously thinking about dumping an email address I've had for almost 10 years because of the spam I get - it's not a huge deal at home, but it makes it almost useless when I'm on the road. Spammers should be hung, drawn and quartered...

[Kathy_Harris]

I wonder if this bill is a tool for internet providers to recoup lost bandwidth and avoid people that want to do this through their systems.

[David Johnston]

It's a start - but it's only one state in one country. Spammers could register using another ISP or use some sort of proxy. Lots of room to manipulate the law.

Never really had trouble with spam up until a year ago when the Klez worm took hold. When I closed my account in December it was getting >200 Klez variant emails an hour. 99.0% of my mail was Klez, 0.9% was spam (from harvesters and also due to klez spreading my email as a forged 'from' field), and 0.1% was genuine, important mail. The reason it was so popular? My e-mail, [email protected], appeared in at least four plain text files that ship with Counter-Strike - exactly the files that Klez scans.

My current e-mail is only accessible via a form. My university account gets about 3 or 4 spams a day - despite me never having revealed it to any third party I didn't trust. Doesn't help that such addresses are numbered sequentially...! Doesn't help either how some routers on the internet are specifically set up to harvest addresses from mail that past through them en-route across the world. &lt;/rant>

Mayhem. But this is a good start. If only it became US and European law, then we'd start getting somewhere.

[ricksfiona]

I've got the T-Mobile PPCPE, and I'm seriously thinking about dumping an email address I've had for almost 10 years because of the spam I get - it's not a huge deal at home, but it makes it almost useless when I'm on the road. Spammers should be hung, drawn and quartered...
Amen to that. They are all leeches who want to make an easy buck.

Anti-spam law will be tough to enforce though.. Especially since they can move to an off-shore location and screw the U.S. laws. But then again, I've been getting junk snail-mail for years and nothing has changed there.

[Duncan]

It is good to see attempts being made to control spam and criminalise the spammers. EU legislation to come into force in October will make sending unsolicited commercial e-mail illegal throughout the UK with ALL companies and organisations being required to introduce 'opt-in' rather than 'opt-out' to e-mail lists.

OK - even if Europe and the US cut off the spammers they can still operate from from other countries - but if operators from elsewhere are threatened with being 'cut-off' from the EU/US - they will soon be forced to behave...

I'm lucky not to get much spam (maybe two or three out of 200+ messages a day) but the last person to spam me (some idiot in a North of England garden centre who was foolish enough to give his actaul e-mail address) - other than the mass spammers - I sent him an e-mail warning him not to do it again... when he sent me an e-mail saying he would do what he liked... well I made sure his e-mail inbox would be nice and full for several days, and also signed him up to a couple of choice lists...! Curiously I've not had another message from him!

[jimski]

My Corporate e-mail (syncs and wirelessly downloads to PPC) does a good job of filtering spam. I have restricted my Hotmail account to a few domains (also downloads to PPC) to virtually eliminate spam.

I would never consider having my AOL account download to my device though. The battery would not last through a single session.

[Roosterman]

My gut feeling on this it is just feel good legislation. By this I mean it is only going to be effective forthe next election, "See, I have done something good. Don't you feel good about what I am doing for you? Now, give me your vote so I can do more. :roll: " I don't think it will stop much spam at all. :cry: Most of the spam I get is just deleted. I wouldn't know if it is illegally sent. The biggest problem I have are with spammers from Russia or just plain unsolicited "offers". Fortuneately, it isn't much either.

[LarDude]

I hate to say this, but maybe universal adoption of byte charges is the
answer (including email service[s]). The actual rate could be ridiculously
low, so that "normal" usage patterns would see very little differences
in overall costs, but spammers would take a big hit. As opposed to trying
to enforce onerous and unenforceable laws, hit 'em where it hurts, in the
pocketbook. A side "benefit" from this would be that the byte charges
for downloading high volumes of pirated music and video becomes
noticeably more expensive also.

Having said all this, however, I'd have to say that I'm not a big fan of
byte charges (feels like you're being nickled and dimed), but spammers
may be forcing us down that path.

[igreen]

Perhaps tagging on a penalty for some of those companies advertised on SPAM. I got one from Disney the other day!!!! I sent them a scathing email back...still no reply from the mouse.

[smittyofdhs]

the key to this law is the fact that they adopted it in Virgina. This means that all the ISPs in VA can now go after any spammer. Keep in mind that AOL and other major ISPs are based in VA. So if anybody sends spam to an AOL.com email account (or any of the others) then the law can apply to that spammer.

The only problem I see with it is that a spammer can be anywhere in the world. Is AOL really going to sick the legal dogs on some dude sending commercial spam out of Asia...? probably not....

It's a start, and that's all we need to get the ball rolling. As an IT director, the biggest question I get asked day to day is about all the spam my users get. We filter as much as we can but these spammers change their methods everyday. They'll use different spoofed email addresses, different domains, different key words... It's totally impossible to keep all the spam out. What we need is for all the states to adopt this law or make it federal, likewise the UK (already mentioned above that they are doing this in Oct.), Asia, Europe also need to crack down on these issues as well. Either that or a global internet governing body needs to be established and given the right to poilce what's going on.

[lurch]

Well, as a professional "email marketer", aka spammer, I don't agree with the new law!

KIDDING! Please don't :snipersmile: :worried: me...

I ain't no spammer, and that law is great! I'm guessing it'll be more of a guinnea pig type of law, where they get a few people to set an example, and then have the law available should anything semi-serious arise.

[Brad Adrian]

I know Jason recently commented on how effective Spamnet has been in reducing the amount of junk that actually reaches his inbox. What kind of results have other people gotten?

I've installed Spamnet, but I'll be darned if I can get it to work correctly through my corporate VPN to the Exchange server. If I can get that done, I'll be a happy camper.

[bdegroodt]

It's interesting to watch the legislature that's shown itself inept at just about every other technical legislation try to solve this problem (Most likely because it's a problem that impacts them personally.). I think it's technology that will solve this long before law. Authentication, Bayes (I use PopFile and have had a nearly perfect 98.34% filter results over the last 5,929 emails in 44 days. That's about 1,300 SPAM ads I never saw.) or some other technology that our great minds in the comp sci labs are working on right now are the best suited people to attack this problem.

Laws only keep those that are willing to obey in line and the legal system is far from likely to be able to handle a flood of accused spammers. Aside from the fact that the first few years of these "laws" are going to be tied up in court arguing everything from "It wasn't me!" to "It's my First Amendment right to spam!"

[Duncan]

Is AOL really going to sick the legal dogs on some dude sending commercial spam out of Asia...? probably not....

No. AOL is a US company however so what if (I'm going to mention the 'L' word so all you Americans brace yourselves! :wink: ) they were forced by legislation to block ISP traffic (all internet companies in the EU and US forced to do this - not just AOL) from countries that don't implement anti-spamming legislation.

Normally I'm no fan of the big Western nations throwing their weight around - but in some cases it can be for the good and exponentially increasing rates of spam could cripple what is possibly the most prevalent and important form of person-to-person communication in the world today.

Let's face it - which nation is going to risk having its IT communications with Europe or America cut off? They won't - they'll act to prevent it.

[ctmagnus]

:really mad: I hate those b@$+@rd$!

I get very little spam thru the isp I use. I registered a domain to use for email, forwarding all email received at certain addresses at that domain to my actual email account. One of the first pieces of spam I received thru the isp (fwiw, I've received &lt;10 unsolicited commercial emails in the 16+months I've been at this isp) was spoofed to appear that it came from the domain I registered for myself! If there was human intervention there, it wasn't a very intelligent human.

[Gerard]

Duncan; that garden guy staring blankly as the volumes of trash came pouring into his Inbox - that's a precious image. I enjoy thinking of evil things to do to spammers. For a little while, when the Kournikova and KlezH things were a bit more plentiful, I was collecting them on my Casio. The email client I used at the time, Casio's Mobile E-mailer, was of course impervious to viral attack, so I just grabbed them same as any other attachment. I didn't learn much from reading the guts in various notepads, but kept them around mostly to test PPC anti-virus programs with. (Of 3 AV progs I tested, none detected a virus, telling me that they were absolutely useless software.)
So this one person kept spamming me, and like yours he was silly enough to use an actual working return address. I complained once almost-nicely, protesting that I had no use for HGH or 'herbal Viagra', but he kept right on doing it and even told me to go to hell. I sent him 5 different viruses. I hope he didn't have too many nice people on his email list. I dunno, in hindsight maybe I did a stupid thing... But frankly I'd love nothing better than to personally smash the guy's nose in. His particular offers did stop, probably just a coincidence though.
I get about 100 emails a day of late, with about 95% being spam of a few sorts. I'm amused at how many variants there are for spelling out things like S*E*X and V!@g®@ and ¶µ$$¥.................... these guys really have nothing better to do.
Until about 2 months ago, my girlfriend seriously believed that I must visit a lot of porn sites to be getting all that crap. Then her Hotmail address, long free of any spam, suddenly started with about 5 of the same sort a day. Within a month it was up to half her email volume. I'd done what I could to block it, and she regularly adds addresses to her blocked list, but now she is getting maybe 30 of these things a day and getting scared. She doesn't want to change addresses, but will if this gets worse.
Mine, I know, are partially propagated from the dozen or so times my site has my address linked. But that only accounts for the virtual addressed ones. More than half of what I get is my true email address, which I never gave to anyone, including friends or family. Somehow these creeps find a way... If anyone's going to have a posse get together and go to some local spammer's house and paste it with flaming baggies of dog**** or something, I'll eagerly join in.

[TomB]

Gerard, Virginia used to have bumper stickers that used to read "Virginia is for Lovers." It sounds like their stickers for the new millenium may add a word to read, "Virginia is for Internet Lovers." Yeap, 21st century Nirvana is an email address with no spam!

[Ed Hansberry]

Keep in mind this doesn't stop spam - only fraudulent spam. So, when you get something that has a tracable return address, that is legitimate. AOL didn't want to stop the 2M spams a day they send. :roll: However, all of those emails in my Hotmail account that talk about someones damp kitten will likely be targeted as those FROM: addresses are blank or obviously not real somains.

[bjornkeizers]

Yugh, I hate spammers. Spammers are like the common cold of the internet: You may stop is on occasion, but it'll come back for more.

There really is no cure for spam, except not using email alltogether, which I'm not prepared to do.

I think the only good way to deal with spammers is to hunt them down, put them against a wall and shoot them. They should bring back public executions for these people. Live on CNN!

[Ed Hansberry]

Oh, cool. Check this out:

from http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/online/inbox.htm

"Report it to the Federal Trade Commission. Send a copy of unwanted or deceptive messages to [email protected]. The FTC uses the unsolicited emails stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive spam email."

Remember to forward FULL headers, not just the from/to/subject/date lines.

[rlobrecht]

But then again, I've been getting junk snail-mail for years and nothing has changed there.

I don't have any figures, but you have to imagine the amount of money that the postal system makes off junk snail mail. Do you think it will be outlawed?

[JvanEkris]

I'm lucky not to get much spam (maybe two or three out of 200+ messages a day) but the last person to spam me (some idiot in a North of England garden centre who was foolish enough to give his actaul e-mail address) - other than the mass spammers - I sent him an e-mail warning him not to do it again... when he sent me an e-mail saying he would do what he liked... well I made sure his e-mail inbox would be nice and full for several days, and also signed him up to a couple of choice lists...! Curiously I've not had another message from him!

There is a trick to this. Under European privacy laws, you can demand that every data an organzition collects can be viewed and destroyed (of course within legal boundaries, and not when you own them money :(). In the netherlands punisment can be extremely severe. Basically, when they don't deliver proof of the destruction, i can have the entire databes confiscated/destroyed, including ALL backups and commercially sold data-sets.

I played this trick when some idiot at the telephone company forgot to mark my mobile phone number as unregistered. I got a lot of phonecalls from people selling insurances etc. I found out that i was in the phonebook, called the company that distributed it. They said it was not their problem, boy were they wrong. Contacted the supervising privacy agency. Their entire database was confiscated, everyone that they sold the database to had to prove they removed the adress, they had to collect all printed phonebooks :twisted: . Never had so much fun in my life....

Jaap

[bdegroodt]

Oh, cool. Check this out:

from http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/online/inbox.htm

"Report it to the Federal Trade Commission. Send a copy of unwanted or deceptive messages to [email protected]. The FTC uses the unsolicited emails stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive spam email."

Remember to forward FULL headers, not just the from/to/subject/date lines.

Please! I don't buy it. If we can barely handle our other "wars" I seriously doubt the FTC has a team of agents ready to investigate what to date is farily uninvestigatable (Is that a word?). For all I know it's a list the government sells on a CD Rom -"24 million opt IN email addresses waiting for your product! Only $59.99) :devilboy:

[TomB]

At a Federal Trade Commission forum this week on spam, direct marketers protested that many proposals floating around to curb bulk e-mail, such as labeling messages as advertisements, will make it impossible for them to do business.

Legitimate mass marketers? I wonder what we have to do to get these BOZOS to understand, that for many people NO UNSOLICITED MAIL OF ANY KIND IS EVER WELCOMED!? I want a marker on ALL unsolicited mail so that I can have it cut off at the server. Just as I can choose to ignore ads in newspapers, magazines, radio and tv, and third class mail, I think I should also have the choice of NOT getting junk email - especially when I have to pay for the bandwidth!

[mscdex]

At a Federal Trade Commission forum this week on spam, direct marketers protested that many proposals floating around to curb bulk e-mail, such as labeling messages as advertisements, will make it impossible for them to do business.

Legitimate mass marketers? I wonder what we have to do to get these BOZOS to understand, that for many people NO UNSOLICITED MAIL OF ANY KIND IS EVER WELCOMED!? I want a marker on ALL unsolicited mail so that I can have it cut off at the server. Just as I can choose to ignore ads in newspapers, magazines, radio and tv, and third class mail, I think I should also have the choice of NOT getting junk email - especially when I have to pay for the bandwidth!

I agree.
Sometimes I wonder if when you click "unsubscribe me" or send an email to a listbot that is supposed to unsubscribe you, if it really removes your email address from their database, or if it just sends you more spam/junk mail (I've always thought this).

[bdegroodt]

I agree.
Sometimes I wonder if when you click "unsubscribe me" or send an email to a listbot that is supposed to unsubscribe you, if it really removes your email address from their database, or if it just sends you more spam/junk mail (I've always thought this).

The majority of the time this is true. Many (Most?) unsubscribe links are nothing more than a verification method by spammers (Your clicking the link tells them it's a live address.).

PopFile! It works. I swear by it.

[Kati Compton]

I agree.
Sometimes I wonder if when you click "unsubscribe me" or send an email to a listbot that is supposed to unsubscribe you, if it really removes your email address from their database, or if it just sends you more spam/junk mail (I've always thought this).

At one point when I felt my Y! account was so saturated it wouldn't matter, I started clicking every unsubscribe button on every spam. A number of them actually worked, and unsubscribed me. The others just ignored it, or sent the email to a forged recipient (it bounced). I did not see an increse of spam due to these efforts. I saw a slight but noticeable decrease.

[Pony99CA]

Oh, cool. Check this out:

from http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/online/inbox.htm

"Report it to the Federal Trade Commission. Send a copy of unwanted or deceptive messages to [email protected]. The FTC uses the unsolicited emails stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive spam email."
Remember to forward FULL headers, not just the from/to/subject/date lines.
This has been around for a while now. At one time, I would forward every spam I got there. I don't know if it did any good, and I never heard from them.

California supposedly has a similar place to send spam, but I've never seen where it is. Worse, they can only do something if both the sender and receiver (I think) are in California.

Steve

[normaldude]

I've been spam free for 3 years now.
How come there's no option "I don't get any spam"?

[bdegroodt]

I've been spam free for 3 years now.
How come there's no option "I don't get any spam"?

Do tell! How is this? Is your cable connected properly? :D

[Pony99CA]

I didn't technically remove an account from my Pocket PC because of spam, but I voted yes. Spam got so annoying in my personal account that I had my ISP change my E-mail address. Now that I have my own domain with virtual E-mail addresses, I just give out an E-mail address tailored to the Web site I'm registering on (for example, [email protected]).

Worse, an account that I set up for my wife, but that she never used, was getting spam. I had my ISP change that, too.

I also changed how my E-mail address was stored on my Web sites.

The results have been great. Since I made the switch, I've gotten exactly two spams. One came because I forgot to modify my E-mail address from the PayPal code I use in case anybody wants to donate money to my site (I know that because the E-mail was to [email protected] -- unless PayPal is selling E-mail addresses).

The second was to [email protected] pushing Web site hosting. They probably got that E-mail address from a domain registrar, and there's not much I can do about that; if I get more like that, I'll just route [email protected] to the spammer. :-)

My old address was [email protected] and my wife's was [email protected]. As my wife's had never been given out, I can only assume it was hit via a dictionary type attack. Changing the addresses to [email protected] and [email protected] has solved the problem. Interestingly, my daughter's E-mail address, [email protected], had been given out a few times to kid's Web sites, but she has only received one piece of spam. Maybe the "q" helps. :-D

Steve

P.S. Here's the code I use to shield my E-mail address on my Web site. Feel free to use it, too.


&lt;A HREF="mailto:anything&#64;svpocketpc.com">&lt;img SRC="svpocketpc-email.gif" ALT="[anything&#64;svpocketpc.com]" HEIGHT=20 WIDTH=190 ALIGN=MIDDLE>&lt;/A>

In use, it looks like this:

http://www.svpocketpc.com/svpocketpc-email.gif (comments@svpocketpc.com)

The "&#64;" is the HTML ASCII equivalent of the "@", and I have tested that code in both Mozilla and Internet Explorer. I created the GIF file using Windows Paint in a couple of minutes.

P.P.S. Above, I had originally used "fakedomain.com", but that seems to be a real domain, as is "notarealdomain.com". :lol:

[Pony99CA]

I've been spam free for 3 years now.
How come there's no option "I don't get any spam"?
I think the "No - I don't get much spam" option would suffice.

That said, I suspect that you're really a spammer trying to lure us into a sense of false security. :rofl:

Steve

[Pony99CA]

I forgot to mention that numerous federal legistation proposals have come up. TechTV's "The Screen Savers" just talked about one earlier this week proposed by Silicon Valley Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig.

Essentially, it required "ADV" tags and a valid E-mail address to opt out of future spam. There was also a bounty placed on spammers -- if someone tracked down a spammer violating the law, they would get 20% of the fine collected from the spammer.

Lessig is so sure that his proposal will "signficantly" reduce spam that he said he would resign his job if it didn't. :!:

Steve

[normaldude]

I've been spam free for 3 years now.
How come there's no option "I don't get any spam"?

Do tell! How is this? Is your cable connected properly? :D

Here's my system:

I own my own domain name at DirectNic.com ($15/yr), which allows unlimited email forwarding aliases. Whenever I sign up for a website, I create a custom email forwarding alias. Example: I sign up at Amazon.com with an email address like "amazon23423 @ mydomain.com". If that email alias ever gets spam, I just destroy that email alias. I'd also know that Amazon.com sold me out to spammers.

All these email aliases forward to my primary email account (a Yahoo POP3 email account, $30/yr), which I only give to close friends and family. My primary email address has enough numbers in it to avoid dictionary spam attacks.

[Pony99CA]

I own my own domain name at DirectNic.com ($15/yr), which allows unlimited email forwarding aliases. Whenever I sign up for a website, I create a custom email forwarding alias. Example: I sign up at Amazon.com with an email address like "amazon23423 @ mydomain.com". If that email alias ever gets spam, I just destroy that email alias. I'd also know that Amazon.com sold me out to spammers.

All these email aliases forward to my primary email account (a Yahoo POP3 email account, $30/yr), which I only give to close friends and family. My primary email address has enough numbers in it to avoid dictionary spam attacks.
That sounds like the same thing I posted. I'm glad it's worked for three years -- I've only had my setup for about three months, so it gives me hope. :-)

Thanks to someone who posted here a while back, I got my domain at MyDomain (http://www.mydomain.com) which allows E-mail and Web site forwarding.

Steve

[bjornkeizers]

Well, those solutions do work, but I'll be damned if I spend any money just to get rid of something which I didn't want and is even illegal.

I don't want to have to create fake emails, or worry about whether or not Amazon or PPCthoughts or whoever sell my email or have it stolen from them...

My government should protect me. Or at least someone. Spam costs me as consumer money. It costs my ISP money. It costs everyone money, and nobody wants it. At least if I get junk mail, I can tape it to a brick and return to sender.. but I can't even do that with spammers! The only way to effectively return to sender is hunt him or her down, and beat them over the head with that brick...

[Pony99CA]

Well, those solutions do work, but I'll be damned if I spend any money just to get rid of something which I didn't want and is even illegal.

I didn't spend money to get rid of spam; I spent money to get my own domain. I thought that was well worth the $15 a year I spent. The anti-spam benefits just happened to come along for free.

I don't want to have to create fake emails, or worry about whether or not Amazon or PPCthoughts or whoever sell my email or have it stolen from them...
First, the E-mail addresses are not "fake". They work just like any other E-mail addresses, except that they forward to another E-mail address. Some people actually pay for E-mail forwarding services so they can have a permanent E-mail address in case they ever switch ISPs.

In fact, I paid mail.com (http://www.mail.com) almost $20 a year for that. They only wanted $15 to renew, but for that same $15, I got my own domain, E-mail forwarding and the ability to create as many E-mail addresses as I want. For example, I can give my entire family similar E-mail addresses which forward to their real E-mail addresses, and they won't have to get an E-mail forwarding service, either.

Second, spam is going to happen no matter what you do. These E-mail addresses will help you track how a scumbag spammer acquired your address. If that spammer bounty law is ever passed, this could help track them down.

Steve