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Re: Murkowski anti-spam bill could be a problem for ISPs

  • From: Phil Howard
  • Date: Sat May 24 17:03:22 1997

Deepak Jain writes...

> By a real email address, what do we mean? One that doesn't bounce? One 
> that actually goes back to the spammer? What if every 48hrs he/she 
> rotates email addresses so the spammer can ignore the remove requests 
> because (simply put) it is coming from a different spammer (and *still* 
> send untagged email)?

Mailing lists are being sold, perhaps by CDROM.  Asking one spammer to
remove your name doesn't mean you will be removed by any of the others.
And this law may not have any effect on the sellers of mailing lists at
all.  Thus you could end up with this scenario which is the equivalent
to buying mailing labels.  The mailing list seller sells a list for a
one-time use only.  There may be ways to make that work, but even if it
is just a contract for one-time use, the seller can impress on the buyer
that they need to destroy the list after one use to be within the law
(they having effectively removed all names from the list, thus having
complied with all remove requests).  Later they buy a new list from the
seller, who could very well be immune to this law and perhaps anonymous.

There are easy ways around this law.

-- 
Phil Howard KA9WGN   +-------------------------------------------------------+
Linux Consultant     |  Linux installation, configuration, administration,   |
Milepost Services    |  monitoring, maintenance, and diagnostic services.    |
phil at milepost.com +-------------------------------------------------------+
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