Re: Let's be careful about going to SpamCop, maybe

On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 03:13:44PM -0500, Brad Jensen wrote:
> As far as I am concerned, SpamCop is an extortion scheme
> and I think they are violating federal interference with
> transmission laws.

Sorry, folks, but I can't let this one slide. Mike's mailing list and other
mass mailers have been well represented here, but the blocklists haven't. I
guess it falls to me to rebut, as a long-time (if somewhat low-key)
anti-spam activist.

First off, I must point out that there is no right, guaranteed federally or
otherwise, to send email. Computer systems belong to individuals or
corporations (something that should be blatantly obvious to the folks here
who administer them!), and those owners have an absolute right to say what
is done with them. Put simply: my server, my rules. This is not negotiable.

Secondly, blocklists don't block mail. They publish lists of mail sources,
either by IP address or domain, that, in the maintainers' opinion, meet some
criterion or criteria having to do with spam, be it acting as an open relay,
hosting an insecure formmail.pl script, or are associated with known career
spammers, for a few examples of lists that I use personally. What the user
of those lists do with that information is their choice, not the list
publishers'.

Thirdly, it has been held more than once in court that spam is a violation
of ownership rights of computer systems. See the Compuserve v. Cyberpromo
case for the highest-profile ruling; there, it was held that spammers
commit torts known as "trespass to chattel" and "theft by conversion", and
can be held liable.

Finally, if I choose to delegate decisions about who to accept mail from to
someone else that I trust, that's my business, not yours or anyone else's.

SpamCop is a widely used, well trusted service that dramatically cuts spam
for its users, and while it does create some false positive reports, does so
in a much lower proportion than other tools or header parsing by
inexperienced users. I don't use it myself, for I prefer finer-grained
control over my blocking criteria, but I support it fully.

Brad, you get over 200 spams a day? You have much more time to screw around
with dealing with it than I do. I have used several aggressive blocklists
(including the (in)famous SPEWS (http://www.spews.org)) for years, and my
spam load is down to 8 or 10 a day, most of it through a series of
forwarding addresses where I cannot apply the same aggressive filtering
criteria that I do on my own system.