Will Proposed US Anti-Spam Law Help

[gadgetgal99]

Do you think this new anti-spam law the US Congress is talking about passing will help? Won't the spammers just start sending from out of the country instead of Florida. Do you think the new spam software companies would try to block it?


From MSNBC
"The bills would prohibit senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail from disguising their identity by using a false return address or misleading subject line. They also would prohibit senders from harvesting addresses off Web sites and require such e-mails to include a mechanism so recipients can indicate they do not want future mass mailings.
Both bills authorize the Federal Trade Commission to establish a do-not-spam list, similar to the agency’s popular do-not-call list of telephone numbers that marketers are supposed not to call. The FTC has criticized the idea, and the Direct Marketing Association has described it as a bad idea that is never going to work."

[mresell]

Personally, disguising who you are is fraud so why it is not illegal now baffles me. They need to go after the nasties. I think the do not spam is kinda dippy...don't think it will work, but I think lying and scamming like with selling drugs needs to be dealt with. Go after these people first with the laws we got.

[soky]

I agree!!! I receive more than 1000 email per day and less than 1% actually 'matters'... the cost of setting up and modifying filtering rules in time alone is exorbitant.

To the US congress: Make the rules... enforce the rules and for email marketers... live inside the rules or pay the price.

[TonyK]

And now they found a way to pass Vortechs filters by adding a Punctuation
in the words like V.iagra, Via(gra...... so good luck stopping them.

We've been hearing about bills of the kind wandering aimlessly though congressional offices for years. Will legislation stop spam?

Probably not. I've seen some tidy piles of junk faxes waiting in the morning regardless of 47 U.S.C. § 227 being in force since 1991--and those were all from within the US. With spammers, unlike junk faxers, having no telephone tariffs that would make it prohibitive to base their operations outside the US, I don't see what US legislation expects to accomplish.

You know what, I'm not going to blame the spammers for everything, greedy, unscrupulous bastards that they are. There are a zillion sections of the criminal code that they could already be taken down under--sending pornography to minors, selling prescription drugs against regulations, not delivering even the shady goods that they promise to, cracking, stealing resources in order to send spam... and so on. If there's a scam that's not been invented, you can count on it to find its way into your mailbox before the year is out. With such a lack of enforcement of existing laws, what do they expect to get done with new ones, and who's going to pay for another lesson in ineffectuality?

Traditionally, the internet has been a self-policing entity, and in many ways has been successful at it without legislation to force it in a particular direction. Vortech's policies reflect that philosophy. We'll nail the scum without being asked to if it shows up on our network. Problem is, not everyone is as vigilant or as willing to deal with the problem. Some networks are pretty damn permissive.

Your real culprits are a bunch of clueless Korean system administrators who can not or will not RTFM about securing mail servers. Nothing personal against Korean sysadmins but they'll serve as an example as a group since their record is pretty bad--they could be just as well be Chinese, Indonesian or Russian (or American, sure). Your culprits are software vendors with piss-poor quality control and default setups begging for trouble. Your culprit is every private citizen who decides to network a computer without the bare minimum of understanding, maintenance skills or willingness to pay someone who has them.

You know, a networked computer is one of the most complex pieces of machinery that's ever existed, yet everyone is allowed and encouraged to operate one in any context with no training or qualifications. Hell, in some countries you need a licence to take a bicycle out on the road and here you're setting everyone loose on jet planes. If people used and maintained their vehicles like they do their computers, half the cars would fail inspection and the state would be filthy rich from traffic tickets from the rest.

Spammers will use whatever's available. In their business you'd do the same. And there will be no shortage of available resources as long as every bozo with a keyboard can run a desktop computer, a server or a network as irresponsibly as he wants to.

If you want to kill spam, deny the spammers their resources. People using their brains would put most spammers out of business. Maybe they should try legislating in favour of people using their heads instead.

[TonyK]

Well now we "the resellers" or better yet the hosting industry in general is to blame, the spamers are hosted by someone who is not doing his job or more likely by some one who wants to make money at any cost. And the worst part of it all is, the authotities know who the big spamers are but they don't do anything because this guys create jobs and moving goods legaly or not. But any way we the hosting industry have to do something about it, we have the technology lets used all we need is Spider programed to detect spaming web sites in the Network and shut them down.
My 1/2 cent for to day.