The fight against spam hit a new level this week as the Virginia legislature adopted law that could make it a crime to send unsolicited commercial mass email. The law would make spamming a misdemeanor punishable by fines of up to $500. "Malicious" spamming, which the bill defined as causing more than $2,500 in losses for the victim, could be prosecuted as a felony.
The legislation, which follows on Washington State's anti-spam bill that allows spammed users to sue the senders for damages, was passed unanimously by the Virginia State Legislature, and Governor James Gilmore has promised to sign it. A number of other states are also considering tough anti-spam bills.
The American Civil Liberties Union said that it expects to challenge the new law on constitutional grounds, but America Online, which has its operations in Virginia, was reportedly quite pleased. Under the new law, America Online and other ISPs could sue the sender for damages of $10 a message or $25,000 a day, whichever is greater, and a spammed Internet subscriber could seek similar damage amounts. AOL has successfully sued more than forty spammers, but has been able to recover little of its losses.
Meanwhile, at WebTV....
WebTV's continues its own spam-fighting efforts by blocking domains from which it says spam has been sent, and once again, several addresses at MSN.com were on its list. The Microsoft service was in good company, along with more than thirty major universities (hope you weren't waiting to hear if you got in), the US Information Agency, NetGrocer (you didn't order ice cream, we hope), and more than 200 other foreign and domestic mail servers. Popsite, a popular free email service that competes with Microsoft's HotMail, appears to be fully blocked from sending any email to WebTV subscribers.
Net4TV Voice continues to receive mail from WebTV subscribers telling us that their friends or families' ISPs have been blocked from sending them email. WebTV states that it informs postmasters of domains that are blocked and includes instructions on being removed from blocking. It states that ISPs who don't receive the instructions should (somehow) email to WebTV for instructions.
If you suspect your friend's mail is being blocked, the first thing to do is to look up the ISP on WebTV's current block list. You or your friend may be able to send the page to the postmaster at the ISP (try the address postmaster@domain.com, replacing "domain.com" with the ISP's domain). Some ISPs report that they have had to call to WebTV to get their email unblocked, and have been successful.
Spam -- No Easy Answers
Spam is an ongoing problem for which there are no easy answers. WebTV has been criticized for being over-zealous and Microsoft itself is in court in a lawsuit filed by Blue Mountain Arts for blocking of its greeting cards. WebTV users can be troubled even more than PC users by spam because of the limited space for email -- legitimate mail can bounce if your mailbox fills up with spam.
On the other hand, the ACLU points out that there are freedom of speech issues involved. But many spammers hide their origin by sending through others' email servers without permission -- using resources that they don't own and causing serious problems for the companies through which they send. The issue of theft of services is
Many of the domains being blocked by WebTV, for example, aren't spammers themselves, but have had their mail servers used by third parties. This week, Net4TV Voice spoke with the postmaster at a domain that was being used by a spammer. The postmaster needed to keep his mailserver available for his staff in the field, and had blocked off the spammer's IP number. The spammer immediately dialed in on another IP number (from a major provider) and sent out another batch of spam. The domain is blocked by WebTV, the postmaster has been deluged with angry calls and emails, while the spammer -- now blocked from this domain -- has reappeared in our email sending through yet another company's mail server.
One thing that you can do to help fight spam is to never, never buy anything on the Web for which you have received unsolicited commercial email. Spammers are imaginative, and may try very hard to make it appear that they're a friend ("hi" or "I met you in chat") or that you've requested the information from a visit to their websites. This week, we even received spam trying to sell a report about "how to stop spam." We stopped it, all right. We reported the spammer to his ISP and he was cancelled.
Virginia, Home to AOL, Moves to Outlaw Spam -- TechWeb
