Congress approves anti-spam bill!

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The U.S. Senate voted Wednesday to outlaw deceptive "spam" e-mail, and set up a "do-not-spam" registry for those who do not want to receive unsolicited commercial e-mail. "

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS...reut/index.html


About time!

Too bad it's not really enforceable... hard to track down, and spammers can simply use out of the country mail servers where the government has no jurisdiction.

I think here in California they passed something similar (basically that you can't spam from California or TO any email address in California).

It's nice to have on paper, but the only real way to stop (or at least slow down) spam is to completely redesign the SMTP protocol... which means every mail server in the world would need to be updated.

- Shawn

Yes but since it might become a law than maybe it'll be inforced. If USA just "removed" it's own spammers than that would be a huge blow the SPAM itself.

-PK

Not really... all the "big time" spammers do it from offshore...

Check the headers of any random spam. the vast majority of them come from IP addresses/mail servers outside the US.

- Shawn

well, at least, open relay smtp servers from outside us.

Even closed ones... It's simple to setup your own SMTP server. The "big boy" spammers will colocate their own machines or even pull their own T1s to their own servers.

- Shawn

digitalpoint you just have to diminish all hope of a perfect world

damn techies and their know-how lol

-PK

Sorry man... even more bad news for ya... The way the SMTP protocol is designed, a mail server will always accept email that it's the destination for (since mail servers communicate to each other with SMTP). Some spammers are smart and bypassing the relaying SMTP server these days... they are getting the MX record for the domain via DNS and simply sending spam directly to the destination SMTP server, which it will always accept... instead of routing it through a relay SMTP server.

- Shawn

is there any Email client that will check validity of an Email address, if it is invalid it is probably spam. At least the majority of the emails I get look like bogus domains and user names.

my 2¢


JRM