a bit of lovely news about spam in California

[David Wolfskill]

>Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2002 17:26:21 -0800
>From: Strata Rose Chalup <strata at virtual.net>

>Court upholds anti-spam law
>Unsolicited e-mail not protected, judges say

>Bob Egelko, Kelly St. John, Chronicle Staff Writers
>Friday, January 4, 2002

>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/01/04/MN228257.DTL 

Yes, I'd consider that encouraging, though I do rather wish that a
citation for *which* law had made it into the article.  (Ref. the
SMTP greeting from mail.catwhisker.org.)

The other thing that kinda bugs me about the decision, though, is that
the cost of sending the junk (i.e., the cost of
transmission/storage/relaying) doesn't seem to have been considered --
and it is my perception (the value of such tools as Catherine Hampton's
spam bouncer notwithstanding) that as soon as a system has accepted
responsibility for delivering spam to its ultimate recipient(s), the
spammers have begun to "win" (at the expense of the rest of us).

In other words, I believe it is best to stop spam as early in the game
as possible, pushing responsibility for dealing with the mess closer and
closer to the spammers themselves, so that the ISPs who host them will
perceive that there is a real cost to allowing their resources to be
thus abused.

To that end, I am working on a glimmer of an idea....  :-}

Cheers,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
I believe it would be irresponsible (and thus, unethical) for me to advise,
recommend, or support the use of any product that is or depends on any
Microsoft product for any purpose other than personal amusement.