AU, I wish it were that easy. I don't think the courts have decided this yet.
Craven, some SPAM is illegal (pyramid schemes and such), but most is not.
And let's be clear; I'm not saying that I like the situation either (I'm a systems administrator also, though it's been years since I've run Sendmail), but certain types of access are definitely legal (SMTP Relay host for example). I *hate* spam, and I would love to find a way to stop it, but I only know of one technical methodology proposed to handle it, but it hasn't been widely adopted yet.
The legal route is another issue entirely.
rosborne, I'm not talking about relay. I'm talking about exploiting sendmail or somesuch and generating the SPAM from the server.
e.g. the A2K server is attacked daily by spammers. The first time they were successful and sent a couple thousand emails to random AOL addresses from the Able2Know hostname and spofing an Able2Know email.
I patched it within hours (they attacked the server less than 45 minutes after a formmail exploit was published but they had sent out thousands of emails already.
That is already illegal (at least in some states).
Correct, "in some states" (see links above). But it is ineffective without comprehensive legal controls. And we don't have them yet.
Sorry, I didn't mean to divert the discussion from Worms/Virus/Punishment to SPAM.
We could probably do a whole other thread on the odious qualities of SPAM.
Best Regards,
Ok forgive me for keeping this off track but why would they waste their time doing this when there are easier ways to spam like scan the site for email addesses with an extractor and just spam using some ISP sendmail that they left running to spoof the email.
