Are Spam Lawsuits A Waste Of Time?

By | March 12, 2004

Not everyone thinks the big boys are on the right track by pursuing spammers in the courts.

Postini, ‘the industry’s leading provider of email security and management for the enterprise’, says spam “cannot be solved by lawsuits and legislation alone”.

America Online, Microsoft, Earthlink and Yahoo announced on Wednesday that they had filed numerous civil lawsuits against spammers, charging them with violating the provisions of the two-month-old CAN-SPAM Act. Steve Kahan, corporate vice president for Postini, says, “We believe these law suits will only succeed against small unsophisticated spammers, while doing little to stop the overwhelming amount of spam clogging corporate America’s email boxes. We hope these lawsuits do not give people running email systems a false sense of security.”

Postini says that since CAN-SPAM it “has seen no reduction in the amount of spam directed at its customers”: 75-80% of all messages are spam, viruses and other malicious email. On March 3, Postini recorded its highest spam day ever, blocking 103,193,573 spam messages.

Of course, Postini would say all this. “We make sure our 2600 enterprise customers and ISP’s don’t have a spam problem,” says Kahan. “There’s no need for them to spend money suing spammers because we keep them totally protected.” But what about the rest of us, who don’t have an ISP willing to pony up for this kind of service?

That said, Postini are probably right about the lawsuits. Spam is processed outside the U.S. and other territories getting tough on spam. The only way to close down spammers, in my view, is to go after the people using their services. Spammers don’t sell the goods, they just market them.

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