From: "Eric A. Hall" <ehall(_at_)ehsco(_dot_)com>
As all of us who have gone go court with a TCPA action know, that
is wrong. You generally file against the advertiser instead of
the fax blaster.
Has that worked (honest question)? The feds and states always seem to go
after the initiator of the call. Even in those cases where they appear to
go after the advertiser, it is one and the same party.
I offered to settle and collected my costs.
Notice I did use the word "work." Doing the TCPA dance is a lot of effort,
and effective only against local outfits, unless you spend a serious
amount of time and legal expertise. See http://www.junkfaxes.org/
The future of spam is fast approaching.
It does not involve authentication, because mail from strangers is
still mail from strangers whether it has a Verisign signed signature
or anything else. Mail from strangers might or might not be spam.
If you want to make your mailbox private, you can do that now. If
PGP, SMIME, etc. are too much work, then pick a username that is very
obscure and give it only to people you trust.
And no, it's not a matter of spammers being anonymous. Essentially
no spammer is anonymous today, because essentially all of them leave
billing trails at their ISPs and because anonymizing SMTP open relays
have almost entirely disappeared. Spammers are anonymous only in the
sense that ISPs can'be be bothered to check their logs and launch lawyers.
The future of spam won't involve paying individuals to receive mail,
because that's just too much trouble and expense. It would work for
celebrities, but for the rest of us it would be equivalent to giving
up on a public mailbox.
DNS blacklists will remain, but will continue to help against only
the worst, most unambiguous spammers. Other schemes including
various content filters will also help. Still other schemes such
as teergrubing are based on wishful thinking and ignorance of how
the Internet and SMTP work in practice.
The main path will be that bulk mail will be taxed at about $0.10 per
target with stiff criminal penalties for evading the tax. The money
will be split evently between the taxing bureaucracy and ISPs in the
name of "fighting terrorism," "closing the digital divide," and "for
the kids." That will end the whack-a-mole spammers and leave the
field open to the Fortune 200,000 and anyone else who wants to hire
a DMA member. It will also throttle the spam in mailboxes much
as the costs of bulk paper mail throttle it. Some of us will use
bulk detectors like the DCC to throttle it more.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com