From the Washington Post…
One of the spammers he outed, George Allen Moore, Jr, whined about it and sued.
Website here.
I certainly don’t approve of the other folks who may have used the public information provided by Mr. Uy to illegally threaten Moore. OTOH, perhaps Moore now knows that one reaps what one sows.
FTR…the presiding judge had the good sense to rule against the spambag.
Perhaps Mr Moore can share his misery with Alan Ralsky
Ah, sweet, sweet revenge.
Bwahaha! Beautiful!
Isn’t there a bolt of lightning laying around somewhere with Moore’s name on it?
Is someone else other than myself hoping that he “starts his car?”
Sounds like a great idea, but spammers go to considerable pains to conceal their identities, often spoofing the FROM headers in their messages. so it looks exactly as if a different person sent it.
Where on the internet would they be posted?
Mangetout, when I add a spammer’s name to my block list, I think that list contains the actual email address of the sendee.
I don’t believe that to be the case, Zoe; my anti-spam software sends back a “message delivery failed” report, in the hope that this will eventually get the address removed from the list, but over half of these return messages cannot themselves be delivered, often because the host name cannot be resolved or something - the ‘from’ address in a spam message is often not even a member of valid domain.
I receive SPAM in my government e-mail inbox. Usually I just purge it. BUT, I’ve lately been receiving unsolicited serious porn e-mails (incest, pedophelia, etc). They have been handed over to our attorneys office. I’m not the only one, last I heard the attorney’s office has over 500 e-mails in this vein and they are pursuing prosecution of the spammers.
Agreed. I’ve even received spam email with my own damn email address forged in the “From” and/or “Reply-to” header.
To determine where spam originates from…you have to decipher the headers.
The only way to block spam is to block by known “spammish” ip addresses that are listed on blacklists. This blocking is down the the ISP level.
Otherwise, you’re stuck with “filtering” on the client side with something like a bayesian filter
.
In the case of the OP, Mr. Uy used Whois and other tools to find out about person(s) who were hosting web sites or domains.
In theory though, the headers should contain some other routing information that could be used to retrace it, but all the spammer has to do is send using his own SMTP engine and a free (relatively) anonymous internet account (which he never intends to use again).
What I want to know if does PA have a similar law? I could be making a mint off of spammers.
Thanks for those links beagledave–very informative.
An additional anti-spam tactic some e-mail clients has is to bounce back a fake message indicating that the e-mail address isn’t real. This stops a fair deal of normal spam as dead addresses aren’t worth sending to.