Florida spammers sue anti-spam groups

The Register ^ | 23 April 2003 | John Leyden

[steve-b]

A group of Florida-based porn peddlers, penis enlargement and Viagra spammers has united to file suit against anti-spam organisations.

Under the newly-registered name EmarketersAmerica.org, a front set up by notorious spammer Eddy Marin's lawyer Mark E. Felstein, the suit seeks to force prominent anti-spam organisations to stop blocking their spam....

Steve Linford, of The Spamhaus Project, told us the law suit was without merit and purely motivated by an attempt to waste the time and energy of those fighting against the spam menace.

"Spammers will try anything. These lawsuits are intended to tie you up in defending it, wasting time and money," said Linford....

[steve-b]

Linford believes 90 per cent of the world's spam is down to 180 recidivist spammers. Deal with them and you've cracked the spam problem, he believes.

One MOAB... just one....

[Tennessee_Bob]

Just one? Come on, fight fire with fire. Let's see, I get at least 20-30 spams a day - let's reply in kind. One hundred and eighty activists times thirty MOABs - 5,400 MOABs - times twenty thousands pounds of explosives each...108,000,000 pounds total...sounds fair. Now, let's let them know that they have won a free vacation in Florida on the beautiful Eglin Gunnery Range...

[Rifleman]

Too quick. My prefered solution involves flaying knives, salt, steel fence posts and crows.

[John Beresford Tipton]

Feeling lucky, spamming punk?

[agitator]

These spammers are stupid. Absolutely NOBODY likes spam except the few spammers themselves. This is like the mafia suing somebody.

[PaxMacian]

Time thieves deserve far worse than a quick way out. I am unsure if anyone could conceive of a punishment to suit these spammers.

[sharktrager]

I hate SPAM, but the truth is, they do it because it sells. They need an extremely low response rate to make a profit.

There are so many anti-spam programs available that I have got to where I don't let it bug me.

[Lysander]

People who get all "hot and bothered" over spam remind me of the little old lady in the neighborhood when I was a kid who got pissed everytime a ball went in her yard. She had all the right to get pissed, but had no real reason to let it run her life. She would stand in the window waiting to bitch about us walking on her yard.

[JoeSixPack1]

Jeez louieeze, doesn't everybody see the protection racket going on here??

90% of all pop-up ads I used to see before I bought Norton were offering pop-up blocker software. Half of all the spam i received was offers for spam blockers.

Al Capone would be proud.

[Mr. Bird]

I don't have a bad spam problem. But I swear I'd like to hobble the jackasses that put flyers on my windshield. Death to the flyer spammers!

[Technogeeb]

People who get all "hot and bothered" over spam remind me of the little old lady in the neighborhood when I was a kid who got pissed everytime a ball went in her yard. She had all the right to get pissed, but had no real reason to let it run her life

You're clueless, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you don't know how clueless you are. Do you realize how much spam actually costs? By many estimates, over 80% of the e-mail traffic (and associated bandwidth costs) on the Internet is due to the spammers. In addition to bandwidth, the MTA server resources (hard drive space for storage, etc.) consumed by spam e-mail means that these people are parasites, increasing the costs of connectivity for everyone but themselves.

It isn't simply a digital version of junk mail. Imagine someone invading your home, going through your desk drawers, and stealing all your stamps (if they don't find any, they'll steal something of yours and sell it to get money for the stamps). They then use these stamps to mail you advertisements for products or services that you quite likely find offensive. They'll use your name to contact your friends, and then steal from them as well.

In lost productivity and stolen resources, these people are literally costing the economy billions of dollars. Just because you personally don't feel the effects of their theft doesn't legitimize their actions. While you only see one or two messages from the spammer, major ISPs have to absorb the costs of millions (and even billions in the case of the giants like AOL, who broke the billion spams a day barrier a few months back) spams. Ultimately, someone has to pay for those costs, and since the spammers don't, the costs get passed on to the customers.

Spammers are criminals. They use fraud, theft of services, identity theft, and numerous other criminal schemes in pursuit of their activities. When you defend them, realize with whom you are allied. These people aren't innocent little kids accidentally hitting a baseball into a neighbor's yard; they are thieves hitting the little old lady over the head with their bat and stealing her property.

[mr.pink]

Lousey analogy.

A better one might be the old burning bag of dog doo on the old lady's front porch, not done once a year or so, but done dozens of times each day.

The old bat would be in the right to get plenty pissed.

Spammers are abusers who's level of annoyance may in the end prove a means by which the gov gains regulatory control of email.

[Technogeeb]

A better one might be the old burning bag of dog doo on the old lady's front porch, not done once a year or so, but done dozens of times each day.

Even that analogy is inadequate. Assume the kids have stolen the old lady's purse in order to buy the paper bag and you get a bit closer. There is more than the annoyance factor; there is also the fact that spam results in billions of dollars in theft-of-services.

[SpyGuy]

Oh, you are so wrong!

I bet you don't own your own domain name. If you don't, then you probably don't realize that the owner of a domain catches any and all mail sent to that domain. For example, if you have the domain "www.nospam.com", then you will receive anything addressed to _@nospam.com (where _ is anything the spammers want to use).

Of course, much of the garbage can be filtered (more on this later), but not all. Let's say I have ten legitimate addresses at my domain (e.g., john@nospam.com, jane@nospam.com, webmaster@nospam.com, etc.). each one of those address will eventually get spammed by several dozen messages per day. So that means one domain can get flooded with well over one hundred messages.

Now, the automatic spam filter programs (which, btw, we have to pay for) can sort out some of the crap that comes in, but not all--and spammers are always altering their spam in deliberate attempts to bypass the filters (like spelling "sex" as "seks"). Furthermore, automatic filters are not perfect nor infalable. Just as they often miss spam, they also often throw away legitimate messages. For some people (perhaps you) who do not care if you accidentally miss a message from aunt Matilda, that may not be a big deal. But for those of us who conduct a significant portion of our business over the Internet, missing legitimate messages are not an option. Therefore, I can never rely on the spam filters to automatically delete the messages. The best I can do is have the spam sorted into a separate folder where I have to personally review each and every one before deletion. With the quatity of spam I get (I own several domains), I can lose up to thirty minutes per day dealing just with spam. Multiply that by the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of business people who do business on the Internet, and we are talking a tremendous loss of worker productivity that directly impacts our economy.

The other thing to consider is that even if the filter programs were perfect, there is still the cost of sending the spam through the Internet. That cost is NOT born by the spammers. It is born by the owners of the network "pipes" (wires, fiber optics, satellite comms, etc.) and the computer gateways. These bandwidth costs are real and guess who pays them? The consumers, including you.

So tell us again how this is like the "old lady in the window" analogy?

[Revolting cat!]

Kill 'em all. Slowly, as we'd all prefer. Problem solved.

[Feldkurat_Katz]

I waste spammers' time. Whenever they provide a form asking for phone contact, I fill it out. The more worthless leads they get, the better.

Of course this is not a long term solution and I don't think system admins have time for this anyway.

In the long run, spam should be prosecuted as trespass, which it is.

[SpyGuy]

There is also an important social component to this problem that must not be overlooked. The ugly truth is that a good percentage of spam is pornographic in nature. I'm not just talking about messages that say, "If you're over 18, click here." I'm talking about text desciptions and images of some of the most graphic and perverse pornography you could ever imagine, including beastiality, child pornography (perhaps simulated but revolting nonetheless), S&M, scatology (sexual pleasure derived from feces and urine), homosexual acts, rape, etc. Actual IMAGES of this stuff delivered daily into your home for you and your family to see, courtesy of the spammers.

How many American children get this stuff in their email boxes (at home or at school) everyday? How would you like it if someone sent your child graphic photos like this via US Postal Mail (and made you pay for the delivery too)?

And--this is what really pisses me off--the spammers deliberately craft their messages to bypass the filters that are supposed to safeguard your children (let alone your own sensabilities) from this pornography. That is why they mis-spell words (like "seks" instead of "seks"), use graphics instead of text, and use false subject lines. If they were only interested in getting this stuff to the people who wnat it, they wouldn't deliberately design their messages to slip through the filters.

[texas booster]

A few more stats. A very large (even hugh) company (Fortune 1) receives 1.25 million+ emails per day. An estimated 40% of those emails were spam over the winter.

1,250,000 x .40 = 500,000 emails x (est.) 1,000 bytes per email = 500 megs of trash EVERY DAY that this hugh retailer must receive, pay for bandwidth, store, filter, process through their hundreds of gateways, delete manually, and now, through the wonders of HIPAA and GLBA, store and organize for the next seven years.

Truly insane. Maybe Megaco will decide to sue the spammers out of existence. I hate the legal beagles, but this may not be a frivolous lawsuit.

At least we will force the spammers to move out of the US.

[RansomOttawa]

People who get all "hot and bothered" over spam remind me of the little old lady in the neighborhood when I was a kid who got pissed everytime a ball went in her yard.

The analogy would work if the little old lady was trying to enjoy working in her flower beds, but had to wade through knee-deep tennis balls just to find one petunia.

I estimate that 60-75% of my email these days is spam of some kind or other.