On Thu, 07 Dec 2000 19:51:35 -0500, L.D. Best wrote:
> UCE/UBE and spamhaus spew aggravates me. But today I got really ticked
> off.
> I want the Feds to pass a law that anyone who has to use an HTML
> generator based upon dozerware just to send a "make me money quick"
> e-mail should be forced to clean the George Washington Bridge with a
> toothbrush and no safety harness!
"Make me money quick" emails and even snail-mails and dead-drops and
telephone calls are already illegal under the fraud statutes. It doesn't
matter how the con artist sets up his communications with his victims.
This type of enterprising endeavor is illegal, period. We don't need any
more laws against fraud. What we need is enforcement of the existing laws.
Because the con artists know that they will be in big trouble if they get
caught, it is not at all surprising that they should resort to measures
designed to cloak their identities and to cover their tracks.
In the case of promoters of legitimate products and services, and
who use the unethical marketing technique of spamming, it is likewise
easy to understand why they don't want their emails to be successfully
traced. Of course they don't want their web-sites shut down for failure
to abide by the terms of service with their web-site hosts and their ISPs.
What is needed is a system whereby the ISPs would screen incoming email
for spam and to bounce it before it ever gets uploaded onto your POP3
server. It would seem to be an easy task for someone to write a program
to read and examine email headers in such a manner to identify a message
as spam. The program could look for such things as the originating SMTP
server and it could perform legitimacy tests on various items of
information indicated in the headers. The bastards can be easily flagged.
I once wrote to my ISP to request that they bounce all emails being routed
through a list of SMTP servers that I named. They replied saying that
there is no way they can do that. Of course we know that they just don't
want to do that.
All the best,
Sam Heywood
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