I have no interest in visiting pornographic sites, but in the last four weeks, I’ve received three extremely graphic pornographic emails.
I don’t want this smut on my PC. I’m doubly concerned about my nieces running into it while they use it. While I don’t mind the constant “universal driver’s license” solicitations and the usual Nigerian email scams, pornographic email is unacceptable.
Is there any way to definitely stop this stuff from washing ashore on my Outlook Express? I tried to set up a filter using Explorer (wrong application, I suppose), but it wouldn’t even let me look at the Washington Post.
How can this be legal? How did they get my email address?
There is no single solution to preventing SPAM.
You can reduce your chances of receiving SPAM if you:
Have a business email account used expressly for business. That means use it only to correspond with known business associates and never use it for any mailing list, even if it’s business-related.
Have a personal email account used expressly for personal needs. That means use it only to correspond with known friends and never use it for any mailing list nor with anyone else you do not know.
Use a generic free email account (e.g., Yahoo) for any and all mailing lists. When you set up the account, enter as much identifying information as required. While the SDMB does not condone anything illegal here, think twice before entering any information which could directly identify you.
When you receive any SPAM from an email account never respond to it, even if they provide an address claiming they will remove you from their list. Just delete it and move on.
You can set up filters in Outlook (Express) to move incoming SPAM directly to your Trash. But this only works after you receive your first SPAM from a particular account. Ideally, quit using any Microsoft email product. Since you use Outlook, consider using Eudora instead.
It’s legal because it’s protected free speech. Deal with it.
Check out your own state’s SPAM laws. At least half now have SPAM laws with some states (California and Washington State come to mind) being quite strict with respect to SPAM.
They got your address because you have an email account and you used it at least once. In some cases, that’s all it takes to get on a SPAM list.
Welcome to the Internet. I believe the last figures show close to 50 percent of all email is now SPAM. It will continue to get worse until elected officials get serious about it.
SPAM is one thing. But what I’m concerned about involves degrading and exceptionally graphic pornographic images, and therefore doesn’t merit cavalier disregard on my part.
*Q. Isn’t spam protected by national Free Speech laws?
No. Free speech guarantees you the right to say what you want, within reason; it does not guarantee you a platform to make yourself heard in. My daily newspaper will take any commercial advertisement, subject to two constraints: (a) it must fit within their advertising guidelines, and (b) the advertiser must pay for the costs of distribution. Spam fails on both of these counts.
. . .
Q. Is spam legal?
Maybe.
. . .
There’s a good chance that spam is illegal under various U.S. state laws.
*
However, if you take a look at thomas.loc.gov and read all the bills proposed in Congress regarding SPAM for the past several years, not one has even made it to the floor of either house. And of the three laws passed since 1996 aimed at protecting children, the Supreme Court struck down the first and blocked the second from taking effect. Currently a web porn case is before the Supreme Court (argued last week) that will decide if the government can restrict Internet surfing at public libraries. Yet SPAM email, and in particular, pornographic SPAM remains out there in the netherworld.
My point was not to be flippant, but to understanding the problem, and dealing with it, remains at the individual recipent level. While RiverRunner (as well as what I said in my first post) says regarding state laws, you need to check your state’s SPAM laws and see if pornographic SPAM is mentioned by name, or even alluded to in a generic nature, within the law.
But as the saying goes, “one person’s trash is another’s treasure,” (in a perverse sort of way), it’s still a First Amendment issue. I m not aware of a SPAM law that addresses pornographic SPAM that fits the “contemporary community standards” view with porn as decided in Jacobellis v Ohio (1964).
If anything the “contemporary community standards” by which the issue of obscenity is to be determined certainly has changed in the 28 years since the decision, looser and not more strict.
In effect, ultimate responsibilty belongs to you as owner of the computer connected to the Internet.
IMHO, that’s the way it should be.
We (Royal “we”) all want to protect kids from this crap. The question is, do you want the government to decide, or should it remain a parental/guardian responsibility?
As I said, I prefer the latter, as distasteful as they may be to you, or anyone else.
You can also set up filters in your e-mail client (I use Eudora which is very good, YMMV) to keep out unwanted contents. You can have rules against senders, subjects, text stings in the bodies, etc.
Okay, something of a hijack, but I had a question concerning spam, anti-spam laws, and easy money.
WA state’s anti-spam laws state something to the effect that anybody who receives email with a misleading subject line is entitled to the greater of $500 or actual damage/time lost.
Which is all fine and good, but once I track down the person who sent the email (a dicey proposition at best, but still), what do I do, take the guy to small claims court? Criminal court?
I’ve been getting them lately too - shockingly graphic ones -and I can’t imagine how they got my address. My address ends in .ie, but it seems ending it in .com instead will deliver mails to me as well, and that’s the address they’re using. Fortunately that makes it easy enough to set up the filter to send these straight into the trash but I have the same concerns about them being on my computer at all, especially since Irish law is somewhat stricter than American in this regard.
I dont get a lot of porno, I mostly get stuff from freemail accounts telling me about amazing mortgage/loan rates. Its very annoying. I just filter all freemail (hotmail, yahoo) to the trash.
There are a number of free programs that can help with the spam problem. I’m using “mailwasher”. The stuff is still sent, but it provides the title and address info before the message is downloaded, so you have the option of deleting or bouncing, rather than having the messages downloaded.
Not positive, but I believe you can setup OE, so that your password must be inserted before each opening, so third parties would not be able to view any crap without knowing the password.
Porn is at the top or close to it as far as income on the net. Some ISP and web hosting companies have chosen to be less than enthusiastic in blocking it, because they indirectly benefit financially.
Eudora is an e-mail client that’s as old as the hills (relatively speaking). Early versions were fast and stable, I’m not so sure about recent versions. Perhaps someone who uses it regularly can fill us in.
Spammers harvest e-mail addresses from web pages. If you have your e-mail address listed on any web page, see if you can have it “disguised”, like userNOSPAM@domainNOSPAM.com.
I use the free e-mail service www.myrealbox.com which, among many other features, has some good spam-blocking in place.
It’s very hard to disguise your email address. Sophisticated address crawlers can remove any “NOSPAM” strings easily. Some more recent techniques include encoding your address as an image - but this means visitors cannot click to compose a message, and you can’t do this unless you have access to add the image to the website - or encoding the image using ASCII character codes - also not foolproof.
I use activatormail.com sometimes, its free for 2 meg. email account. They filter out all the spam, porno, viruses, trojans, etc. You’re left with just the bare email that gets through
