Nine Year Sentence for Email Spamming - 1st Conviction

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38788-2005Apr8.html


[img]http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I38765-2005Apr08L[/img]

[Drew]

WooHoo!! Hopefully more to come!!!! :D

[Catweazle]

Oh wow!

I'm pleased that this matter has been tested in the judicial system. I'm pleased that it has been clearly demonstrated that it's a seriously considered thing. And I'm damn pleased that his lawyer has successfully argued that the fella should NOT actually spend any time in prison!

Sure, if he proves to be a serial 'pest', prison time might eventually prove warranted. But if not, then it's definitely NOT warranted.

Seriously, email spam is a pain in the ####. But hell, even for a person such as myself, for whom the workplace exists online and for whom Outlook is basically the 'front-end' to their business, it's just not that much of an impact to spend several minutes or so each day deleting a bit of crap! Certainly not enough of an impact to warrant the idea of someone spending 10 years in prison. I'm able to spend a good deal of my income-earning time online at very little cost. If part of that cost is being bombarded with advertising in various forms (and it IS), then sobeit! Not much of a price to pay, in my view.

Seriously, if people think it IS such a big thing that it warrants someone spending nearly a decade in prison, then I'd suggest you turn off that machine, go outside, and get a life! You take yourself and your inbox far too seriously!

[Drew]

With the amount of spam i recieve i spend about an hour a day cleaning out my inbox. I have a friend who gets more than 3000 emails of spam each day. You might not get a lot, but there are people that get so much it takes them 3 or more hours a day to clean out their inbox. I for one want to see more spammers get in trouble. Spam is unwanted no matter how you look at it!

[Catweazle]

Looks like we may need a tutorial here at Daniweb about how to avoid having spam reach your Inbox. That's an extraordinary amount of spam to be deleting on a regular basis, and with the adoption of some unobtrusive measures, I'm sure most of that time wasted could be reclaimed :)

[Drew]

Its not the email filters. Its how people are getting smart and changing the words so they encoded so the email filter will miss that word.

I have 5 different email filters, but spam still gets by them because people are doing new stuff everyday that makes the email not get marked as spam.

[Catweazle]

Okay, fair enough. but consider this approach:

If your email addy is stuffed beyond redemption, accept the fact. If you need to start off with a new one, do so.

If your needs are complex, maintain mutiple email accounts, and multiple contacts lists for them. Your public email addys are far more vulnerable than your private ones. Do NOT mix 'n' match.

Apply the relevent spam filters. For such as gets through the net, make regular and diligent use of the 'Block sender' function. Your addy will NOT remain on most lists when messages sent to it are constantly rejected!

[Drew]

For support reasons (I own a business and sells eGoods) I can not change my password. I have sold probably around 1000 copies of a software and if I where to change my main support email address then my customers would probably not be very happy.

I do change my personal email address probably once or twice in a few years. But changing a business support email address can not be done for obvious reasons.

[jwenting]

It's so easy to say one should just get a new email address but that's often not an option.

I've had my domain and email address since 1998. Reaching everyone who needs to be reached to send them a new address is impractical at best, impossible at worst.

If you have a business it gets worse still, you're going to loose (potential) customers and will have to spend a LOT of money on new stationary, businesscards, brochures, etc. etc.

I've done some testing here. I run my own server so can create new addresses at will.
After I added a new address it took just minutes before it received spam, despite never having been used! That's how massive the load has become.

My main address currently receives about 30 pieces of spam and virus emails an hour, that's one every other minute 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
At the peak during 2002 the server received over a thousand virus emails an hour for a 2 week period. It got so bad I had to shut down the mailserver and run a periodic deletion program on the upstream server in order to delete all the suspect messages so they wouldn't bog down my connection.

There are companies that have had to install multiple layers of spam filtering proxies in front of their mailservers just to keep them from overloading.

THAT's how bad spam has become.

While at current my server and client based filters can cope with the load, it's costing me in bandwidth and I've a small but significant number of false positives because I've had to install an extremely agressive blacklist to make the load on the client side filters managable.

[Drew]

See jwenting knows what im talking about. And spam just isnt in email anymore... its gone to MSN, ICQ, AIM, and YIM!

WARNING: Dont join a yahoo chatroom or you will be spammed on YIM!! :eek:

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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/aptech_story.asp?category=1700&slug=Accepting%20Spam


could not have been released at a more ironic time:lol:

[Catweazle]

I'm certainly not trying to argue that email spam isn't an extremely large problem. I'm certainly arguing that we need to keep our reaction to it appropriate. Expressing joy that an individual is sentenced to such a hefty term of imprisonment IS, I'd argue, inappropriate.

One fella has been convicted of the crime here. Has he been responsible for 5 of those nuisance messages yesterday? 50? 500, perhaps, of the messages that server jwenting mentioned received? I'd think it damned unreasonable to beleive that he was responsible for all of them. Are we expecting him to bear the brunt of all our anger, simply by virtue of the fact that he's the one who was caught?

I'd consider a single 3 year term of imprisonment to be excessive. 9 years? Hell, people kill other people and spend less time in prison than that, sometimes!

[moderate_rock48]

I agree with Catweazle, a few clicks to delete the crap does not equal 9 years in jail.

Although, I do share quite a bias view since I only have about 5 spam emails to delete everyday. So you can take it for what it is worth.

[zeroth]

I don't approve of giving someone the equivalent of a felony conviction for a little spam. However, it isn't much fun when you can't open your mail program and not be bothered with tons of bs. I had the problem when I lived in Europe but when I moved to the US and had to get another address, it stopped and I don't get anything now. Don't know why but I sure am a lot happier - I had to get rid of about 100 of these trash messages every day.

And when you try to stop them, you never know if when you put your email in that little stop subscription box you aren´t just making things worse.

We do so well with the spyware fixer programs, why can´t someone come up with a program that will ding the spammers. Start wiping out some of the relay addresses back along the line and they will stop...

[jwenting]

9 years may be excessive, but if it sets an example others might be less anxious to start their own little spam enterprises.
Giving him a few weeks of community service wouldn't have caused more than a byline in a local newspaper (if that), giving him 9 years makes sure the case gets worldwide attention which may well have been why the verdict was as it came out.

So he's a sacrificial black goat. So what? He's out of the running for a good while.

While he wasn't responsible for all or maybe even most spam, he was responsible for enough to get law enforcement interested...
Take down the large ones and the small ones will fall by the wayside. The small ones are the ones easiest to block anyway as they're not the smart ones (if they were they'd be large ones).

[TheWebJunkie]

I dont think a spammer should get 9 years in jail, when in the uk you can kill someone and be out of jail in 8 years.

[Catweazle]

I'm certainly not fussed in my own case, but if anyone else has been given negative 'reputation' points for simply expressing the view that spammers do not deserve such lengthy terms of imprisonment, please let me know by PM.

I consider that to be grossly unfair, and an abuse of the 'Reputation' system here!

[jwenting]

All reputation systems are an invitation to abuse anyway so I don't use them.
Any way to turn it off?

[server_crash]

This guy either has a crappy lawyer, or the judge was a victim of his spamming, because this is a long setence for something of this sort.

[meksikatsi]

anyone caught spamming should be punished