North American Network Operators Group


RE: surge in spam email (fwd)

  • From: Greg A. Woods
  • Date: Thu Aug 10 12:01:26 2000

[ On Wednesday, August 9, 2000 at 22:38:12 (-0700), [email protected] wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: surge in spam email (fwd)
> When it's in my own inbox, it annoys me about as much as junk postal mail,
> or telephone solicitors - i.e., not at all.  I toss the former in the trash,
> and tell the latter to toss -themselves- in the trash.  Life's too short to
> waste on developing an ulcer because of morons, you know?
> I guess the traffic does add up to significant $$$ in transport for the
> larger transit providers, though.

Yes, but I think you're missing the more important point.

Junk mail costs real $$$$ directly to the advertiser.  If they want to
waste their money advertising to me, then that's just fine by me.

However spammers generally force everyone else to pay for their crap.  A
$5/month throw-away dial-up account can send millions of messages before
it gets shut down.

In fact the spammers who use open relays are almost always commiting a
criminal theft of service, and sometimes a criminal fraud on top of it.

The problem is that the damages are usually too low against any given
claimant for the legal system to take any notice, and of course
"everyone does it" (i.e. all the spammers are equally guilty and there
are lots of them) so even when the spammer is in the same jurisdiction
as the mailer he compromises, little can be done to achieve any justice.

Even worse the damages are sometimes so low that even the claimants
don't find them annoying enough to make it worth the effort of fixing
their systems so that they're no longer vulnerable to such attacks.

							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <[email protected]>      <robohack!woods>