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Spam Conviction Actually Reduces Spam?
On Nov. 3 Virginia jurors convicted two North Carolina residents of breaking Virginia’s toughest-in-the-nation spam law by sending over 100,000 emails per month with fraudulent and untraceable routing information. At almost the same time, spam to our main mailbox was reduced by over 50%. Whether the two events are related is subject to conjecture. Virginia’s spam law asserts jurisdiction if enough emails are sent to Virginians, from Virginia, or through Virginia. Since AOL is headquartered in the state, a large percentage of all emails do, in fact, pass through Virginia, though it may be impossible to tell exactly which do and which don’t. The brother and sister from North Carolina were convicted on three counts each of sending emails with fraudulent “header” information to make it impossible to unsubscribe. AOL cooperated with authorities in both drafting the law, enacted in 2003, and in the prosecution of this case. The type of spam that all but evaporated from our main inbox is sometimes called “alphabet spam” because it appears that the sender is sending multiple emails to combinations of characters at each domain name. One such email was addressed to: contact@npadvisors.com; euresti@npadvisors.com; gagne@npadvisors.com; gange@npadvisors.com; gatesy@npadvisors.com; gerich@npadvisors.com; grubb@npadvisors.com; gugler@npadvisors.com; haven@npadvisors.com; heacock@npadvisors.com; hornsby@npadvisors.com; inquiries@npadvisors.com; kaser@npadvisors.com While “contact” and “inquiries” are valid addresses, the rest are not. However, our main inbox accepts all emails sent to any unassigned mailbox @npadvisors.com. This way, we won’t reject as undeliverable an email sent to “sales@” or “help@” or to misspelled names. As a result, we received the above spam 12 times. Spam, which averaged about 250 per day before the federal CAN-SPAM law was signed, zoomed to 500 per day by the time it was effective on January 1, 2004 and had peaked at almost 1000 messages per day before Election Day. The following week, they fell back to under 200 per day. Is it possible that other spammers have gone farther underground in order to avoid prosecution? Last December, NPA predicted that spam would increase in spite of the new laws. Let’s hope we were wrong! November 2004 | |
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