At 01:47 PM 5/5/97 -0400, Dan Mouer wrote:
>In the past three or four weeks I have begun to get daily junk e-mail,
>[snip]
>I was wondering if the rest of the folks here
>have been having the same experience.
>
 
Definitely!
 
The problem is growing rapidly out of hand as spammers are getting more
aggressive in harvesting email addresses, and reacting with more
sophisticated software to hide there identities and protect their
connections. This despite the growing reaction from concerted spam fighters
to put them out of business. Recently, the situation has been exacerbated by
a major ISP named AGIS making a deal with the worst spam abuser of them all,
the self proclaimed Spam King Sanford Wallace, to provide his spam company
protected access to the internet without fear of losing service.
 
It's important not to ignore spam, or simply use the delete key and forget
about it. Spam is theft of service. It steals bandwidth, storage space,
access costs, and time to clear all that junk off the system. It invades
privacy and ignores individual rights to property and peace of mind. It's a
form of harassment that abuses the open nature of the internet to promote
schemes that could not legitimately be promoted in any other way.
 
In my opinion, spam on the lists should be aggressively responded to by the
List Owners, with explicit policies against it and termination as a
consequence for any breech. Immediate steps should be made to prevent the
membership listing from being openly made available to anyone for download
onto a spamming list. The Listserve itself should actively analyse any spam
to the List in order to discover it's point of origin and make an immediate
complaint to that site's Admin, requesting termination for the spammer under
their own Terms of Service. The rest of us should try and become more aware
of the problem and get involved with productive solutions to it before it
gets totally out-of-hand.
 
Cheers,
 
 
--Lenny__