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RE: fyi.. House Committee Passes Bill Limiting Spam E-Mail

2000-06-19 23:00:03
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Unsolicited bulk or commercial email.  Fairly straightforward. 
Unsolicited, as in you did not ask to receive it.  Bulk, as in sent to
masses of people, including but not limited to "repent ye sinners" and
"fund my charity" or "vote for me."  Commercial, as in intended to
generate income directly or indirectly.  Basically any form of
cost-shifted advertisement, profit or non-profit.

The issue is that if you want to blast out your ad, whatever the
content, you should not make other people i.e. the intermediary
networks/hijacked relays and end recipients, pay for transporting and
receiving the ad.  

The problem is that so long as there are ISP's who knowingly provide
services to the spammers including hosting websites when the spammers
spam via separate providers, there will be volume spam.  If every US
provider, including those providing transit service outside of the US,
refused to peer/do business with providers who allow spammers on their
network/host websites for spammers and sent those feeds to null0, spam
could be reduced significantly.    If those providers' feeds were
blocked from the US backbone until they canned the spam they might put
a stop to it on their side of the pond.  Right now a large percentage
of the spam is being relayed by servers external to the US,
particularly from .jp and .kr and Telstra/Big Pond in .au.  Most of
the websites themselves are being hosted in the US by providers who
won't nuke a site that is spamvertized.

Radical, perhaps.  A technical solution, yes.  If you don't want laws,
you need a technical solution.  If you don't want technical solutions
like the RBL (blocking feeds,) then pass laws to punish the
spamhaus/spamophiles/Rodonas of the net and the providers who enable
their spew.  One way or another something has to be done, as the
spammers and their providers are killing email as a viable business
medium with its (spams) negative halo effect, and everyone is paying
for it except the spammers and their providers.

- -
James D. Wilson, CCDA, MCP
"non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem"
William of Ockham (1285-1347/49)
 


- -----Original Message-----
From: mark(_at_)flash(_dot_)localdomain 
[mailto:mark(_at_)flash(_dot_)localdomain]On Behalf
Of
Mark Atwood
Sent: Monday, June 19, 2000 3:34 PM
To: Chip Rosenthal
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: fyi.. House Committee Passes Bill Limiting Spam E-Mail


Chip Rosenthal <chip(_at_)unicom(_dot_)com> writes:

On Thu, Jun 15, 2000 at 09:35:23PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
And I hope that the courts will finally realize that freedom of
speech 
includes the freedom not to have your communications disrupted by
people 
who want to sell you things.

The biggest problem with the bill, as it currently reads, is that
the
transport notification has been dropped.  There was an ID by Hoffman
and Levine (I believe since expired, can't find it now) that allowed
an organization to "opt out" from unsolicited commercial email by
indicating so in the SMTP banner.

Rescap Profile for Mail User Agents
draft-hoffman-rescap-mua-02.txt
November 20, 1999

- -- 
Mark Atwood   | It is the hardest thing for intellectuals to
understand, that
mra(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com | just because they haven't thought of something,
somebody else
              | might. <http://www.friesian.com/rifkin.htm>
http://www.pobox.com/~mra


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