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Hopefully a prosecution like this will prevent others from spamming. It should certainly cause them to give it serious thought.
 
Lacero said:
Is is solitary confinement? If not, well....
I think I would prefer solitude, to being someone's...plaything... as for the spammer, we can only hope he finds "true love", and has several "friends" all those nine years, he has truly earned it... :D :p
 
How is spamming really defined? If a company decides to email all of its potential customers info on their product, I see nothing wrong with that.
 
scu said:
How is spamming really defined? If a company decides to email all of its potential customers info on their product, I see nothing wrong with that.

Oooo...watch your back. You could be next. ;)
Nothing wrong with it so long as the potential customers have given the said company access to it's email address.
 
I don't remember giving my email to someone who wants to sell me cialis, have me view their pr0n, give me a low mortgage rate, sell me a rolex, or put $25,000,000 US in my bank account. :)
 
This guy is not in jail - he's walking around until his appeal. I hope they are keeping an eye on him so he doesn't keep spamming while his case goes through the legal system.

I think he should be sentenced to 1,550,689,285 years in prison, one for each spam he sent.
 
yellow said:
I don't remember giving my email to someone who wants to sell me cialis, have me view their pr0n, give me a low mortgage rate, sell me a rolex, or put $25,000,000 US in my bank account. :)

Hilarious! The sad thing is that there are enough suckers (it only takes a few) that get this crap to make it worth it to the spammers.
 
Wow, so our government DOES work? :D And here I thought it wouldnt since all the Government mainly uses is Windows. I hope hes thrown in a Federal Pound-Me-In-The-A** prison XD
 
scu said:
How is spamming really defined? If a company decides to email all of its potential customers info on their product, I see nothing wrong with that.

It has been a while since i have had to think of the laws on this. But there is a I believe the SPAMCAN Act that requires the option to either opt-in or opt-out of receiving "unsolicited" emails.

In either case, anyone that does not want to receive this crap is supposed to be provided a link in order to prevent further mailings.

What should happen in the instance that you illustrate, is that the company should send out an email indicating that they are wanting to send further offers to you. At that point they should provide an opt-out option. End of story.

More directly, when they gather your email address they should seek your permission to be able to send you any unsolicited emails.

The problem is defining unsolicited. For if you send an email to Company A, requesting a quote for goods or services - do they have a right to keep that email address to send you further emails that you did not request?

I see this as a possible gray zone. For if you come in to a store asking about product A, the sales person may mention product B that is associated with with product A. Since so much business is now done by email, this can be looked upon as an extension of the sales cycle.

In the end, based on my management of email lists, there is little reason for a consumer to to be "harassed" by further emails. Yes, there are times that a database change, or other factors may result in further emails - but my experience is that if this addressed in the first part of the body of the email most are willing to forgive you.

I am ALMOST ready to bet my paycheck that this slimeball never intended to respect the wishes of those that he emailed. that any requests to remove a name from the list took months to process.
 
yellow said:
I don't remember giving my email to someone who wants to sell me cialis, have me view their pr0n, give me a low mortgage rate, sell me a rolex, or put $25,000,000 US in my bank account. :)

Or better yet, that they think that either my penis or breasts need to be enlarged. Or that I am wanting to work from home. Or that my credit is so bad that i need help.

the solution is one that we as consumers may not like. And that is to charge five cents per an email sent. There should be a way to prevent the average person from paying the fee, but any "bulk" mailer should pay.
 
Chip NoVaMac said:
the solution is one that we as consumers may not like. And that is to charge five cents per an email sent. There should be a way to prevent the average person from paying the fee, but any "bulk" mailer should pay.

One interesting solution is that you pay not with money, but with CPU cycles.

A digital postage stamp is a number created by a complex algorithm that takes e.g. 10 seconds to run on your average PC. The typical user will notice no difference, the email will just sit in their outbox for 10s while the email program generates the stamp.

But for spammers it would be a real cost... to make enough stamps they would have to invest in mucho computer hardware...
Might tip the cost/return equation against them.
 
broken_keyboard said:
One interesting solution is that you pay not with money, but with CPU cycles.

A digital postage stamp is a number created by a complex algorithm that takes e.g. 10 seconds to run on your average PC. The typical user will notice no difference, the email will just sit in their outbox for 10s while the email program generates the stamp.

But for spammers it would be a real cost... to make enough stamps they would have to invest in mucho computer hardware...
Might tip the cost/return equation against them.

I agree to a point. Though any business would be willing to spend X cents to do a mass emailing to a list of customers IMO. The problem is that with the way things are now, it does not matter to the slime like this, it is a cost of doing business.

Along with the 9 years he is to get, he should loose all property he and his companies and family members got that can be linked to his illegal activity.
 
Inkmonkey said:
Oooo...watch your back. You could be next. ;)
Nothing wrong with it so long as the potential customers have given the said company access to it's email address.

Oh I get my share of junk mail everyday. It pisses me off and I hate it.

But if I attend a home remodeling show and give my email to some pool company to send me info on their product, I would not be too upset if I get some email from a light company telling me about special pool lights.

I would hate to see that light company get into trouble with the law because they send me an email
 
Why not just sentence these folks to 1 second in prison an a 0.1 cent fine for each mail they sent? That's about how long is wasted dealing with them if done manually and a penalty to cover the infrastructure costs of transmission. Even a mom and pop shop that screwed up and sent 10,000 messages to folks would only spend a couple hours in jail and get fined $10, and were they to buy a bulk list an hit a million it'd still be less than 2 weeks and $1000. But Joe Evil Spammer, who fires off, say, a billion messages (something ONLY a spammer could do), would be looking at 30 years in prison and a fine of $1 Million. That'd give you second thoughts before going into the business.

I'm somewhat more in favor of simple prosecution for offenses and a new system that makes it impossible to forge the sending address, not a "tax" of any sort (CPU, monetary, etc) on spam--any significant deterrent to sending large volumes of e-mail would heavily impact smaller business doing totally legitimate opt-in bulk mailing.

Let's say I shop at a smallish online store with a couple of employees. They have a weekly deals mailing that's nearly free to send out now, and so it's easy for potential customers to sign up for it and watch for a deal they're interested in. But if even a "negligible" fee were charged, it could make such a mailing--a perfectly legit, appreciated, opt-in list--financially unprofitable. Worse yet, a shady competitor could write a malicious script to generate thousands of bogus registrations, costing them money sending to people that don't exist.

Alternate example: let's say I have a totally free e-mail newsletter on my for-fun site that people interested in X sign up for. Right now, 10,000 people could sign up and it doesn't cost me an extra penny to mail them all. But with an e-mail-tax, it would, and I just wouldn't do it. The case for a large non-profit would be worse--they might have a mailing list of a million people that they use for action alerts, but if there were a tax on sending those messages, there's no way they could afford to mail the list in any case but an emergency, if even then.

Nah, just make it hard to fake and throw the bums in jail.
 
scu said:
How is spamming really defined? If a company decides to email all of its potential customers info on their product, I see nothing wrong with that.
"Spamming is the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited messages in bulk. In the popular eye, the most common form of spam is that delivered in e-mail as a form of commercial advertising." continues at Wikipedia

The key word here, to answer your question, is "unsolicited"... ;)
 
In addition to the unsolicited bulk emailings, this guy has the added degree of spamming by hiding his sending address (or hijacking other peoples addresses to send his spam from).
 
Mitthrawnuruodo said:
"Spamming is the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited messages in bulk. In the popular eye, the most common form of spam is that delivered in e-mail as a form of commercial advertising." continues at Wikipedia

The key word here, to answer your question, is "unsolicited"... ;)

"Unsolicited" may not be enough.

Here is another example. A bunch of High School Seniors in one State give their email address when applying to take their SAT. As a result they get an email from a Company advertising Senior Rings or Senior pictures.

There is a fine line, and I just can not see it. Perhaps hiding the source of the email from which it came is one way to show that it is spam. Or getting the same email 30 times in one month could be another.
 
Reanimation_LP said:
Wow, so our government DOES work? :D And here I thought it wouldnt since all the Government mainly uses is Windows.

Actually no, it doesn't. This was prosecuted under Virginia State Law (they were the first to adopt anti-spam laws a few years ago). So, Virginia's Government works.. :)
 
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