Can-Spam Increased Spam 362
andy1307 writes "According to New York Times, spam has actually gone up [Free registration required. You gave real info, right?] since the CAN-SPAM act went into effect. There is a graphic in the article that illustrates this increase. Before the CAN-SPAM act was passed, spam was about 60% of all e-mail traffic. Now it's 80%. In a we-told-you-so quote, Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, says CAN-SPAM legalized spam by giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules. Slashdot covered this story last year. For companies that offer offshore "bulk advertising" servers, business is booming. A survey from Stanford University estimates the global cost of spam in terms of lost productivity to be at 50 billion $ and 17 billion $ in the US alone. CAN-SPAM does give prosecutors some leverage to go after the merchants - but it must be proved that they knew, or should have known, that their wares were being fed into the illegal spam chain. " The BBC has a related story talking about rates of spam, viruses, and scam mail.
No Registration Link & Article Text (Score:3, Informative)
Article Text:
A year after a sweeping federal antispam law went into effect, there is more junk e-mail on the Internet than ever, and Levon Gillespie, according to Microsoft, is one reason.
Lawyers for the company seemed well on the way to shutting down Mr. Gillespie last September after he agreed to meet them at a Starbucks in Los Angeles near the University of Southern California. There they served him a court summons and a lawsuit accusing him, his Web site and 50 unnamed customers of violating state and federal law - including the year-old federal Can Spam Act - by flooding Microsoft's internal and customer e-mail networks with illegal spam, among other charges.
But that was the last the company saw of the young entrepreneur.
Mr. Gillespie, who operated a service that gives bulk advertisers off-shore shelter from the antispam crusade, did not show up last month for a court hearing in King County, Wash. The judge issued a default judgment against him in the amount of $1.4 million.
In a telephone interview yesterday from his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Gillespie, 21, said he was unaware of the judgment and that no one from Microsoft or the court had yet followed up. But he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and vowed that lawsuits would not stop him - nor any of the other players in the lucrative spam chain.
"There's way too much money involved," Mr. Gillespie said, noting that his service, which is currently down, provided him with a six-figure income at its peak. "And if there's money to be made, people are going to go out and get it."
Since the Can Spam Act went into effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk e-mail on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent or more of all e-mail sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 percent to 60 percent of all e-mail before the law went into effect.
To some antispam crusaders, the surge comes as no surprise. They had long argued that the law would make the spam problem worse by effectively giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules.
"Can Spam legalized spamming itself," said Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, a London organization that is one of the leading groups intent on eliminating junk e-mail. And in making spam legal, he said, the new rules also invited flouting by those intent on being outlaws.
Not everyone agrees that the Can Spam law is to blame, and lawsuits invoking the new legislation - along with other suits using state laws - have been mounted in the name of combating the problem. Besides Microsoft, other large Internet companies like AOL and Yahoo have used the federal law as the basis for suits.
Two prolific spam distributors, Jeremy D. Jaynes and Jessica DeGroot, were convicted under a Virginia antispam law in November, and a $1 billion judgment was issued in an Iowa federal court against three spam marketers in December.
The law's chief sponsor, Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, said that it was too soon to judge the law's effectiveness, although he indicated in an e-mail message that the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees its enforcement, might simply need some nudging.
"As we progress into the next legislative session," Mr. Burns said, "I'll be working to make sure the F.T.C. utilizes the tools now in place to enforce the act and effectively stem the tide of this burden."
The F.T.C. has made some recent moves that include winning a court order in January to shut down illegal advertisi
More spam (Score:2, Informative)
IPTables really helps. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Informative)
I think the issue is... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, the spammer scum (I know, don't need to add scum, spammer covers it) figure that it's a law for show, which it is..
The top 10 spammers are responsible for something like 3 quarters of the spam sent. If Only half of those spammers were locked up in jail (where you have to admit they belong, because of their tactics, never mind the UCE itself).. spam would drop noticeably.
The law needs to be improved. The law needs to have teeth.. and the law needs to chew some big time spammers.
That's the only thing that'll slow things down.
shortcut to zero spam (Score:2, Informative)
The submitter needs an education (Score:1, Informative)
"50 billion $" should be "$50 billion"
"...but it must be proved that they knew..." should be "...must be PROVEN..."
Flame me, mod me down, but Slashdotters with poor writing skills (skilz?) come across as idiots and not the technical elitists they pretend to be.
Re:resources are out there... (Score:4, Informative)
That's like saying crime is good becuase it keeps cops employed, or that terrorism is good because it keeps the military employed. The point that is missing, is that the net cost of crime, terrorism, and spam typically is greater than the economics of the industries spawned to combat them.
Yeah, I know, comparing spam to terrorism is a bit of a stretch, but I think the point is valid.
Re:Duh... (Score:3, Informative)
Quite right. AND be sure you are confirming opt-ins (ie... send a confirmation email to the address with a unique URL which must be clicked to confirm subscription). Otherwise, anyone can signup anyone else... and there are some mailbomb programs out there that automate this for 100s of sites that don't confirm, forcing the victim to unsubscribe from every list.
Hosting Costs (Score:3, Informative)
Running up their hosting costs is an effective means of reducing spam.