Spam Control Considered Harmful
Bill Becker
bbecker at iconn.net
Sat Nov 1 16:28:40 UTC 1997
On Wed, 29 Oct 1997, Scott Hazen Mueller wrote:
> address verification may or may not be enough. There is no statute or case
> law that makes the owner of an address legally liable for the mail emitting
> from there - this could be an issue for claims of forgery and the like.
Scott -- I believe that the legal ins and outs are mostly moot. The scope
of spam is global while most law is national or local. To use
less-than-global law to regulate something of a global nature, you would
need customs services that would prevent spam from being smuggled in from
other jurisdictions where spam is legal.
I believe that the only thing you can do with courts is to use the civil
courts to discourage spammers. You sue the bastards, but only after you
get abused.
> *possibly* be the infrastructure for building the second. However, limiting
> anonymity likely wouldn't provide a strong deterrent by itself, since spammers
> could still run through multiple non-anonymous dialup accounts over the
> lifetime of a spam campaign.
The basic concepts about email have to change. The present system is
hopelessly out of date.
> The scheme has generally not been sketched in much further detail because the
> deployment issues typically overwhelm any discussion.
One way this could happen is with large content providers. They must see
spammers the same way that we do -- As parasites. If AOL and CIS et al
wanted a UCE-free protocol, i'm sure that Qualcom and Netscape et al would
support it. Somebody let me know when beta testing starts.
Bill
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