Spam illustrates problems of spam

Found on The Inquirer on Saturday, 19 June 2004
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An unwanted email received yesterday illustrated some of the basic problems with an opt-in legislation in one country and an opt-out legislation in another.

"If there is a valid email address out there then this is legal for Quest Systems to send email to this until this specific email address does opt-out from getting future newsletters from Quest Systems."

"For any that get hostile towards or flame or send any shape or form of a threat to Quest Systems it will be that these will be proactively reported to the FBI." [He must be clairvoyant if he reports proactively.]

And therein lies the rub. When one country adopts one type of legislation but others another, and when folk like Mr Kurtz assume that because we have no country identifier in our email address we must be based in the USA, the fundamental problem of conflicting anti-spam legislation becomes very obvious.

Spammers aren't that bright. Obviously, the Internet is a US thing only, covered entirely by US laws. I don't know how I missed that. Hopefully some of the recipients decide to send a complain to their ISP and website provider (or at least blacklist the mailserver).