Re: Spam revenge

Does the attack go entirely through nations (including starting and ending servers) where maliciously hacking servers is legal? (The Phillipines is promising: hacking is legally undefined (thus legal) there. Fortunately, even the Phillipines pays attention to property damage).

If not, may I suggest something more effective: a UCE bouncer email client. Apple's default email client for OS X has this feature (manually configured), so it should be legal most places. (The client must, of course, use the real from path, rather than the From: header, which is worthless.)

Even if the UCE specialist used 3rd party relay to launch his emails, you would be motivating that ISP to fix their config files. Otherwise, you're persuading the UCE specialist to remove the dead email.

Comment on Re: Spam revenge

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Re^2: Spam revenge by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Sep 04, 2002 at 02:09 UTC
In fact, UCE is illegal in many countries; I'm not sure about its status in the US, but I think I heard that it is there as well. It has been banned by law in Germany a long time ago, although that has of course not decreased the amount of foreign spam. Even not given those laws though I don't see how UCE bouncing could ever be construed as illegal. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]
Re: Re^2: Spam revenge by zaimoni (Beadle) on Sep 04, 2002 at 15:12 UTC
UCE is legal in the U.S. with the condition that a functional opt-out URL be provided in all instances of the UCE. (Such a URL is an email validator, alas. This actually makes things easier for UCE specialists, since there is no particular requirement to remove the email address from other email lists.) However, the Federal law explicitly legalizing UCE is fairly recent (late 2001?). Violations are the domain of the U.S. FTC.	[reply]