So, Anti-SPAM Is The Law, But Do You Really Think It Will Stop?

I've been roaming the Internet since the really early 90's. Yes, that makes me old, at least in Internet terms.

I've seen SPAM, and I've seen SPAM increase logarithmically in recent years. I wrote an article in 1997 for Network World titled "Defending spam, plus survival tips for a spam-filled world". In this article I said "Spam is not inherently a bad thing". In 2003, I think I can say "Spam is not inherently a bad thing, if the spam is legitimate. But. It's usually not, hence SPAM is a bad thing!"

But, regardless of my repenting my ways, this new federal law is absurd. Let's look at part of the proof of damages that make the sending of SPAM a felony:

(B) the offense is an offense under subsection (a)(4) and involved 20 or more falsified electronic mail or online user account registrations, or 10 or more falsified domain name registrations;

(C) the volume of electronic mail messages transmitted in furtherance of the offense exceeded 2,500 during any 24-hour period, 25,000 during any 30-day period, or 250,000 during any 1-year period;(D) the offense caused loss to one or more persons aggregating $5,000 or more in value during any 1-year period;

(E) as a result of the offense any individual committing the offense obtained anything of value aggregating $5,000 or more during any 1-year period."

These are noble values, but does the US Government have the resources to track down every spammer? My e-mail server handles at least one spam message and/or spammer per every 5 seconds. Taking my trusty calculator and dividing 1 minute by 5 seconds, I get 12 spams a minute. That's 720 spams per hour, or a whopping 17,280 pieces of spam per 24 hour period. That's just on one e-mail server!

Who's going to investigate this stuff? How much money is the government going to spend to investigate these 17, 280 pieces of spam (much of it coming from t-dialin.net, by the way).

From my point of view, it's just another pointless federal law.