From: Robert Elz <kre(_at_)munnari(_dot_)OZ(_dot_)AU>
...
For what it is worth, the UK seems to have gotten on exactly the
right track in killing spam (and other similar abuses).
It isn't the e-mail that is really the evil, that's just a symptom
of the true problem, which is misuse of personal data for purposes other
than which it was originally given.
Fix that problem, which a few more countries introducing legislation
along the UK lines would do (one in particular...) and the vast majority
of the spam will simply go away.
I agree that the majority of the worst spam might be stopped, the spam
from generally or relatively large organizations advertising to people
they think they know about. However, there is a lot of spam sent even
by large organizations to addresses that they have not idea about,
including the validity of the address. The buyers of the those
30,000,000 address CDROM's know nothing about their targets, and many
of their addresses were never valid. If you say that the U.K. laws
would stop the use of those lists, I'll ask about the lists of user
names are that mixed with domain names and sent as so called "dictionary
attack spam." My machinery has caught a lot of spam sent to the names
in http://www.rhyolite.com/cgi-bin/dict-attack mixed with "@rhyolite.com"
and "@calcite.rhyolite.com" I generated that list from my error logs.
None of those user names has ever been valid in those domains.
(yes, I've seen odd names such as t15679j15492 repeatedly).
Then there is the well known U.S. Pacific Northwest vendor of advertising
but nominally of PC audio software that has been infamous for many years
for sending messages to likely but invented mailboxes such as "postmaster"
and "root" at arbitrary domains.
Would that spam be stopped by the U.K. laws?
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com