Rude Participant

[zachariah]

question:  How is this going to affect all of the open proxies, relays, and comprimised machines where the spam is actually being sent through.  These people will say I am not the source of the message, my system was misconfigured.

I see two possible answers:

• They wouldn't be held responsible -- it is the job of the vigilante (a motivated ($) individual) to find the real culprit who was attempting to send the spam.
  
• They would be responsible and people would learn real quick that security is in their ($) best interest.
  

my quick responses to some of what else you said...

Yes, some spam is untraceable ... for now. There is in the works tech fixes for better verification of senders. We have to wait and see how useful that is.

As for free speach -- we need a constitutional amendment which says, "Corporate Speech is not Free Speech", or "Businesses are not People". That would clear up a lot of problems (and of course cause others).

And here's both the links I referenced

• Lawrence Lessig's article September 16, 2002, A Bounty on Spammers (pdf)
  
• http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/ed...ial/5778539.htm (the May 4, 2003 news article already referenced in this thread)
  

[yourbuddy]

Sure doesn't sound like Lessig is in favor of DNSbl's - does it

[Farelf]

As you might suspect, many of the topics in conjecture here are dealt with in the spam Act but not, alas, how to identify the author/authorizer who is *the only party responsible* under the Act, not proxies, relays etc. not even ISPs unless they are deemed "aiding and abetting", through proof of a knowing relationship (as I read it, they are merely the "carrier").

Miss Betsy's commiserations on how we are to get by in Oz without sending unsolicited commercial emails for advertizing and/or selling goods and services are noted, we shall have to manage somehow. Frankly folks, you haven't been able to cold contact anyone by email for the past year or two anyway. The business I work for never did that in any event but probably through being "old fashioned" rather than having superior etiquette (no, they're not one and the same thing). Yes there are lots of loopholes, the principal ones being not to actually or implicitly advertize or sell anything by unsolicited email to an Australian resident or if you do then do it from somewhere outside of Australia and never come to Australia afterwards or be a registered charitable institution (or be the government, which is never accused of charity) or, the trump, lie about who you are. Yes UBE is *the* problem, any other sort of spam is negligible, almost welcome by comparison - and I'll bet that if anyone is ever prosecuted

under the Act, it will be an uber UBEr.

I would have thought the answer to the whole spamming thing would be to tell the People's republic of China they can't have their Olympics after all, unless they enact spam legislation, then compel Alan Ralsky to immigrate there. But I seem to have been trumped by a personage purporting to be "Bernadette" who informs us:

It's time to change your life.

Better than all other spam filters -

Only Delivers The Email You Want!

This is the ultimate solution that is guaranteed to stop all spam without losing any of your important email! This system protects you 100%.

We didn't believe it either until we actually tried it. So you be the judge and see for yourself.

You owe it to yourself to try this program, and forward this email to all of your friends who hate spam or as many people as possible.

Get rid of spam now.

[Miss Betsy]

My users (this is a company setting) did not include the and, I did during the discussion. The half that answered other in the survey commented either unsolicited or unwanted.

100% of your responses fit at least part of the definition. If you had used a multiple choice question, perhaps 100% would have chosen both unsolicited and unwanted.

One of the reasons that spam continues to be a problem is that the cost of spam is not more than the cost of stopping it. It may be in the future. And I wouldn't be surprised if that is one reason why ISP's do not try harder to educate their users on how to avoid spam or the larger ones don't try to control it by fixing obvious problems. That would cost money now and if technological changes come along, then they can make money by charging more 'because they have to'

Miss Betsy

[yourbuddy]

According to Spamhaus, this is the definition of spam:

The word "spam" as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email ("UBE").

Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

A message is spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

Unsolicited Email is normal email

(examples include first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries, etc.)

Bulk Email is normal email

(examples include subscriber newsletters, discussion lists, information lists, etc.).

This distinction is important because the Direct Marketing Association, the pro-junk group who lobby on behalf of the junk email industry, try to dupe politicians into thinking anti-spam organizations want "Unsolicited Email" banned, in order to dupe policitians into voting against anti-spam laws.

[yourbuddy]

This is the MAPS definition of spam:

Technical Definition of "spam"

An electronic message is "spam" IF: (1) the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (2) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent; AND (3) the transmission and reception of the message appears to the recipient to give a disproportionate benefit to the sender.

[StevenUnderwood]

yourbuddy: Thank you for the text of hte definitions. Those are 2 of the definitions I used in my survey. The users found them to be more complex than what they define spam to be. My bosses and I who wrote the policies agree with them.

This distinction is important because the Direct Marketing Association, the pro-junk group who lobby on behalf of the junk email industry, try to dupe politicians into thinking anti-spam organizations want "Unsolicited Email" banned, in order to dupe policitians into voting against anti-spam laws.

If I had my way, it would be Unsolicited Email which would be banned. I very rarely get my way as I tend to be very idealogigical (sp?). There is no unsolicited email that I want to receive. The company has addresses which solicit specific type of email, so again, by definition, it is not unsolicited.

Unsolicited Email is normal email (examples include first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries, etc.)

Unless the email address these are sent to is appropriate, I believe these to be spam as well. I do not want these at all in my personal account and at my company we provide specific email addresses soliciting these types of emails we wish to see. If it is not appropriate for the account it was sent to, to me and my bosses, it is unwanted and by our definition, spam. If we had only one email address for all company contact, our definition of what is spam at each account would be different.

[yourbuddy]

So, you and those in your survey disagree with Spamhaus and MAPS?

This may be the problem, namely that no one can (or wants to) agree

on what "spam" is - which means you can't legislate against it, if you can't

define it (Law is based on definition and Courts sometimes may interpret).

This is (one of the reasons) why DNSbl services are not universally used.

As noted, if you want just "unsolicited email" to be the definition, then it's

not finding any political favor. Politicians will not (so far) define "unsolicited"

as the definition of "spam". Perhaps this has many reasons, including those

of restraint of trade and interstate commerce, and their own use of email.

Until what "spam" is, is defined (by an accepted authority), it continues.

[Miss Betsy]

Until what "spam" is, is defined (by an accepted authority), it continues.

The problem on the internet is that there is no accepted authority. The other problem is that once you allow anything that limits "unsolicited" and "unwanted" there are ways to argue that what you are sending is not covered by the definition.

In most things there is a bell curve - how people define 'unwanted' goes from *any* email that has not explicitly been given permission by the recipient before sending to those emails about things I am not interested in. If you stick with 'unsolicited', then you get the arguments about long lost cousins and people wanting to buy a product or sell you exactly what you are looking for which would be acceptable to the middle part of the bell curve.

It doesn't matter what the blocklists use as their definition as long as it is consistently applied.

This is (one of the reasons) why DNSbl services are not universally used.

If there were more DNSbl's with varying degrees on the bell curve of definitions, then there were would be more DNSbl's used. And the more DNSbl's used, the more overall spam is blocked by users. It would also give a choice to the consumer and provide competition so that the whole concept would be improved.

Miss Betsy

[yourbuddy]

There are over 100 DNSbl's, and are listed here: http://www.dnsbl.info/

If you used all of them (and I've tried it with just the "top ten") then you

get email from every "legitimate and major" ISP blocked - at some time.

We couldn't even get email from some of our own offices and employees.

Check listing by country here: http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/index.lasso

and you will see the major ISP's whose systems are abused or misused.

[zachariah]

There is no way to write Law if "spam" hasn't been defined.

I have to disagree. The way I see it Lessig's plan only requires labeling and enforcement be legislated (the definition of spam does not need to be legislated) and would be an effective end to spam being sent from the US (and eventually globally as economic forces lead other countries to adopt the same plan).