All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff

Kevin S. Wilson writes in NANAE:

You just don't get it, do you? WE ARE PISSED, VENGEFUL, AND UNSYMPATHETIC. You helped to create the mess that e-mail has become, invading the privacy of millions of people and generally making an annoyance of yourself on a GLOBAL scale. Ultimately, you may have helped to render e-mail unuseable. You think anyone cares that you can't find hosting for a vanity domain? Instead of looking for sympathy here, you ought to be thanking your lucky stars that someone sick of your spam hasn't hunted you down and broken your arms, or worse.

I'm sure we all feel that way some days. (If ASR is the scary devil monastery, what does that make NANAE, I wonder?)

In other good news, Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink and Yahoo are going after some of the most prolific spammers. A quick look at the example emails in the lawsuit documents shows that many of the obvious suspects are in the frame. They're filed against "John Doe" (the US legal equivalent of "John Smith") as this allows the plaintiffs to get ISPs and other organisations to disclose the identities of the people behind the spam, but the targets here are well chosen, so I think the plaintiffs know who they expect to end up bankrupting. The mills of justice grind slowly, but we may hope they grind exceeding small.

There is a conspiracy theory which says this is just large commercial interests getting the porn'n'pills people out of the way, leaving the field clear for mainsleaze. Even if this is the plan of people like Microsoft, there are strategies in place for dealing with spamming from mainstream companies. Such companies can't afford to use the deceptive and criminal tactics of the worst spammers, so blacklists and bulk email detectors like the DCC should see them off.