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More stuff on Spam 2

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petermeachem

petermeachem

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Aug 26, 2000
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I am a little confused. In the recent threads about spam there has been plenty of info by people living in the US about First Amendment rights and how banning spam is against free speech.
I do not therefore understand how Microsoft can take the spammers to court and expect to win.
Explanation please!

As an aside, there was a programme the other evening on UK television that what partly about spam which included an interview with a guy from Spamhaus. I was astounded with amount of money that the spammers make.

Can we just have some info please and not a huge fight. I would actually like to read the thread before it gets deleted.

 
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Apparently MS is suing the spammers that use deceiving advertisment. It isn't suing for the spamming but for the deception and lies of spammers (which could be considered illegal advertising).

It markets the thing nicely so that it looks like they are fighting all sorts of spam but really they aren't.

Gary Haran
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I can't personally see how spam even touches on the Freedom of Speech. Sure it's your right to speak freely but it's also your right to not listen. If we don't want spam we shouldn't have spam.

I really hope they bring in the "Opt-In" or even "Opt-Out" law, then they can really start to crack down. Still with email being global, and one man living in one country accessing an email box in a second country to send mail to a third country - it will have to be a unified effort.
 
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The Freedom of Speech issue could only affect the content of the email, and to the content, it does apply.

Spam is not just about message content.

I don't think Freedom of Speech issue applies because, from my perspective, it's not the content of the message that is at issue, the issue is that it was delivered to me without my consent.

I don't espouse the concept of any rights to free delivery. I'm not quite so sure that just because I have am email address means that it's a public invitation for mail solicitation.

Good Luck
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As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein
 
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Could it be said that freedom of speech can be taken too far in some circustances? I don't believe the founding fathers wanted to protect spammers but the people so they could express their genuine concerns if the goverment was getting out of hand or some injustice cropped up somewhere.

Am I the only one that feels this way?

Gary Haran
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It's said that the First Amendment does not cover shouting &quot;Fire!&quot; in a crowded theater. My sense is that it doesn't cover shouting &quot;Enlarge your <insert organ of choice>!&quot; in a crowded theater, either.
-Steve
 
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Yes, I'd agree that freedom of speech has been taken too far in some circumstances.

The slippery slode is defining what those circumstances where free speech curtaillment is justified. We have seen legal precedent for libel, defamation, pornography, &quot;fighting words&quot;, and public safety issues (yelling &quot;Fire&quot; in a crowded theatre). And I'm sure they're are others. Not going to get any further into this as it's off topic.

But in this case, I don't think SPAM is a Free Speech issue. It's a delivery mechanism issue.

Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein
 
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Sorry, I was going for the cheap laugh and headed off-topic. I agree with you, Cajun - the person is allowed to walk up to me and say whatever he wants (within the limits you noted), but he is not constitutionally guaranteed the right to use communication mechanisms for which I'm paying the bill.

Regarding laws targeting spam, the only one I have serious issue with is that of requiring spammers to give a valid opt-out mechanism - it suddenly puts the onus of avoiding spam on the recipient, and MUCH more to the point, rewards the 'bad' spammer by encouraging behavior that will result in them getting far more feedback on what email addresses are valid and thus more valuable. All the while, the direct marketing industry and their politicians can claim that people can turn off the spam when desired.
-Steve
 
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SteveTheGeek is right about the opt-out business ~ in fact most good advice tells you never to click for an opt out ~ unless you know it is a company of repute that you have signed up with.

<aside>I hope no one asks me where to get that good advice, because I won't tell them</aside>

All the best.
 
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I'd say the biggest issue with SPAM, and the thing that negates its protection under the First Amendment is the deceptive advertising. When you send me an email with the subject &quot;Enlarge your #@$% now!&quot; from user &quot;Gary's Novelty Items&quot;, that may be perfectly legal.

However, most spammers nowaways use depetion to try to get the unwary public to open their mail. Often the subject will be something like &quot;One more thing&quot;, or &quot;I had to tell you something&quot;, and the user will be only a first name, usually female. Open the email, and the content is the same.

Quite often, I'll recieve email from fake email addresses that are copies of my own. For example, if my email address were GHenry@hotmail.com, I'd recieve email from GHenry@ whatever the spammers domain is. This, although highly deceptive and unethical, is at least easy to recognize and delete.

As others have stated above, it's amazing how much money spammers are making! I read an article in Wired about a guy who calls himself the &quot;SPAM King&quot;, who was easily making seven figures just running 40 SPAM servers. What I don't understand is, how could all of this be paying off for the advertisers? Do people actually read their SPAM, and do a significant percentge of them lead to sales?
 
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&quot;SPAM King&quot;...

Without wanting to cause a fight or offend, do you think he uses a psuedo-name because if people found out his real one he'd likely become the &quot;SPAM Queen&quot; very, very quickly?...

I hate SPAM and to avoid it use an app called EMC which doesn't download body messages, only the headers, and which allows you to keep a 'Blacklist' of SPAM addresses/domains which it'll automatically delete from your mail server when you check messages, (from within EMC).

Rhys
Thought out... Maybe,
Opinionated... Probably
But it is only an opinion!
 
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TrmblingBluStar:
Yes, there are lots of people who buy based on SPAM emails. The percentage is low, but if .0001% of all spams generate a sale, and you sent out a billion [that's a U.S. billion: 10[sup]9[/sup] spam messages], then that's 10,000 sales. The return can be tiny, but a tiny portion of a sufficiently huge thing can be large.

Rhys666:
Alan Ralsky, one of the worst spammers out there, was hoist by his own petard last year. In an interview, he stated that he was purchasing property in a certain town in Michigan. An enterprising law student looked up the property transfer in a legal database and published the physical address to Ralsky's new home on slashdot.

Slashdot users then began subscribing Ralsky to every free snail mail mailing list that they could find. At one point, Ralsky ended up hiring several people just to go through his daily mail. And the son-of-a-[gun] had the nerve to complain about it in later press releases. He even threatened to sue, but couldn't find a sympathetic judge -- I wonder why.

All:
I want similar antispam laws in every country. These laws should all require:
[ul][li]that spammers not forge SMTP headers[/li][li]that spammers prepend &quot;ADV:&quot; to the subject line of every spam[/li][li]that spammers not use remailers or open mail relays[/li][li]that every spam email contain in the body of the spam a physical mailing address, phone number, and website where I can unsubscribe from the list[/li][li]that spammers must actually unsubscribe addresses when asked to[/li][li]that spammers keep a &quot;chain of evidence&quot; on every email address in their possession, so that addressees can contact every organization in the sales food-chain and get them to delete my address, too.[/li][/ul]

I figure if you're going to dream, dream big.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions: TANSTAAFL!
 
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As I recall, a lot of the info on a recently deleted spam thread here said that spammers 'rights' are protected by the First Amendment. It seems this is not so. Hopefully the US (apparently the major source) will sort the problem out soon or email is going to be useless.

I don't have a problem with direct mail. Possibly because I write direct mail software. The difference between posted and email direct mail is purely cost. If it is posted, you have to buy a stamp and that costs money. Email is basically free. And that affects the volume. We get, maybe 3 or 4 letters a week offering a credit card or the like. We get round about 200 spam mails a day, all of which are for things I don't want.

What depresses me is the relentless repetition. Why the spammers think I am more likely to get an american mortgage if they mail me every day for a year beats me.

The volume of spam also disrupts normal business. I would like to send out a newsletter to printers and direct mail firms. It is possibly not worth the effort as it is likely just to get binned with the other stuff, or get me onto some dreadful spam list.

 
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petermeachem:
I am unwilling to lump all spam into a single category for the purposes of discussing free speech.

For example, a spam that is sent with intent to defraud is not, under U.S. law, free speech -- speech used to commit a crime is not constitutionally protected. And I can assume that all the penis enlargement spam I get must be fraudulent -- if they all worked and I used all of them, I'd never need to worry about carrying a tire jack in my car.

But, to use the mortgage spam (which I also get at least 2 of every day) example, the claims of the spam are not fraudulent. There is no content in the spam which might be considered prurient. So that spam can be considered protected commercial speech. Annoying, but still protected -- but then the U.S. Constitution does not make any claims to a person's right to not be annoyed.


And I don't know enough about the law to comment meaningfully on spam with altered headers.

On one hand, France, the U.K., Canada and the U.S. all have long and storied histories of pamphleteering as a means of correction of the perceived faults of governments -- so hiding your communication by anonymous publication or through pseudonyms is not, in and of itself, a means to disqualify a communication as protected speech.

On the other hand, the use of a forged sender or return address could be considered means for disqualifying speech as protected because it hides the sender's identity. Many parts of the southern U.S., for example, have &quot;anti-KKK&quot; laws on the books which forbid hiding your identity. I live in Louisiana, and we have such a law (with exceptions, of course, for Hallowe'en and Mardi Gras). These laws have stood up to Constitutional challenge in the U.S. federal courts.

My personal take on forging headers is that it cannot be argued a means of facilitating what might be protected speeech. So I added it to my anti-spam wish list.


Want the best answers? Ask the best questions: TANSTAAFL!
 
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yes I did. It sounds very positive, but then I found this . What happened to that?
I've been looking up UK and Europe spam legislation. They seem to be preparing laws, looking much like the CAN SPAM.

'The view of the European Commission and the UK Government is that spam poses a threat to privacy and the efficient running of the e-economy and should therefore be limited where possible.' Quote from the timesonline. They also mention that a majority comes from abroad and can't be legislated against here.

Whilst looking I found this $74 million is a lot of profit.

This asserts that CAN SPAM won't work.

 
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The bill from 2001 died. No great loss -- tt really was badly written.

The eWeek article is probably right. With all the exceptions, it won't stop spam -- but then, I never expected it to, even without exceptions.

All I'm expecting out of spam is to even the playing field a little. To make it easier to find these irritating morons. CAN-SPAM might make that a little easier.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions: TANSTAAFL!
 
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