Consumer Electronics Industry
The New and Improved Felonious Spam
By B2
May 1, 2003, 7:33am

The New and Improved Felonious Spam

Virginia has raised the bar on spammers that send unsolicited commercial email from or to the state of Virginia by making it a felony. Of course, AOL, the well known home of unsolicited commercial email, is based in the state of Virginia. So how will they benefit from this new law?

Moving something from legal to illegal gives AOL a much bigger hammer to hold over the heads of companies and individuals that choose to spam through the AOL system. Hence increasing the number of legal suits brought to bear by AOL on spammers.

In this new code the spammer can be penalized by up to 5 years in prison and forfeiture of assets and profits relative to their activities. The real question is, where do the assets and profits go? Would they go to AOL? Would they go to the state?

Another interesting thought is why is spam not legal and junk mail in your residence mailbox is? This one seems to be pretty clear. Junk mail has a postage charge that goes to the postal service where an email has no fee attached to it.

And then there is the well known fact that a majority of all spam is generated from outside the U.S. So how will the legality of spam in Virginia change the mind of a spammer from another country?

And what about the fact that most spam is cloaked with forged email headers? Does this mean that the party that benefits from the spam would be at risk? For example, let’s say that a spammer goes into Linkshare or Commission Junction and grabs an affiliate marketing text link for Citibank. The spammer then sends out 100,000 emails with forged headers all to recipients within the AOL domain. Is Citibank in trouble? And who from Citibank would have to serve the prison time?

Last but not least, why does it take legislation to correct an issue that techies can take care of on their own? Why not make email headers that cannot be forged? Why not get rid of generic email addresses? A large percent of spam comes from addresses that reside on free email domains such as @hotmail.com, @excite.com, etc. And if getting rid of generic addresses is not a good answer why not require verification of the person prior to giving them a free email address? Why not require commercial marketing come from the domain that it benefits? This is no different than the stack of AOL disks that you have been sent over the years via snail mail. Why not require email servers all be locked down to specific domain and IP? This would not work well for the those that have dynamic IP addresses on their DSL or on a dial up though.

The bottom line is while spam in and of itself is not one of my favorite things to get with my first cup of coffee in the morning, it is however a part of what keeps the Internet free. It can be left alone, technology used to prevent it, technology used to charge for its use or in the worst case legislated. It really does go from bad to worse in these choices.

While companies claim that spammers cost them millions of dollars per year in bandwidth use I notice that none of these companies have remorse for the landfill issues that are created with all the junk mail they create.

Oh, and if you hang those old AOL CD’s up in your fruit trees they do scare away the birds, or make good body armor when playing laser tag, or glue them all over your roof and reduce your cooling bills, or snow shoes for dogs, or…

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