Vendors spamming NANOG attendees

Wed Jun 14 13:21:21 UTC 2017

Rodney,

You make a good point. But I wonder how often spammers are so obvious, and I wonder if his "leveraging" falls amiss of CAN-SPAM's specific prohibition:

(I) harvesting electronic mail addresses of the users of a website, proprietary service, or other online public forum operated by another person, without the authorization of such person; and

(II) randomly generating electronic mail addresses by computer;

Technically, this spammer harvested the names of attendees at a physical conference, not of some online resource, which is what CAN-SPAM prohibits. I know it's splitting hairs, but that's what spammers do.

My point is that CAN-SPAM is virtually useless. There have been a handful of prosecutions in more than a decade, and spammers are not seeming to be deterred.

I know there are honeypots that try to catch electronic harvesters, but I don't think they could provide proof of someone who got his emails from a list of attendees at an event, a shared customer list, etc.

 -mel

On Jun 14, 2017, at 5:26 AM, Rodney Joffe <rjoffe at centergate.com<mailto:rjoffe at centergate.com>> wrote:

On Jun 13, 2017, at 10:28 PM, Mel Beckman <mel at beckman.org<mailto:mel at beckman.org>> wrote:

But as I said, harvesting emails is not illegal under can spam. And the requirement to not send you UCE to harvested emails is pointless, because how do you prove that someone did that?

Because he said so?

The spammer had the balls to say, in his email:

We do not know each other. I'm leveraging the attendee list for NANOG to reach out and raise awareness of the value of OCS (Optical Circuit Switching) in the data center and in particular, the Carrier Neutral Hotel where we've been active with next generation MeetMeRoom discussions.