Gov. Bob Ehrlich signed a bill Wednesday that will give Maryland one of the strongest junk e-mail laws in the country, allowing prosecutors to put spammers in jail and seize the profits they earn through fraudulent e-mail schemes. The anti-spam bill sponsored by Delegate Neil Quinter, D-Howard, provides for jail terms up to five years and fines up to $25,000 for violating the law. The attorney general also could seek civil penalties of up to $25,000 per day, or between $2 and $8 for every spam message sent in violation of the law. "Spam is just flooding our e-mails," Quinter said.
| I had 397 emails when I came in this morning, most of them in my Deleted bin. I had to look over about 80 messages that weren't caught by the filters. I've had two (that's numeral 2) legitimate messages today — I think. About 70 of the messages were trojans. The remainder offered me drugs, mainly Viagra and its clones (who told?), discount software, pleas from Nigerians, stock tips, real teen sluts performing acts I've never seen before, underground CDs, cable filterz, and mortgages. |
Spam costs American businesses about $10 billion a year, he said.
| I recently started the process of refinancing my house and it took me a week to get things set up so the loan officer's mail could get through. I also missed a job offer I would have jumped on. |
America Online said in a statement that the new Maryland law is a "huge leap forward" in the national battle against spam. "This new state law ... will help us rein in the kingpin, outlaw spammers who continue to use tactics of fraud, deceit and evasion to avoid state and federal laws, as well as trick AOL's anti-spam filters," the statement said.
| One of the reasons people quit using AO-Hell is the inadequacy of its spam filtering. I watched the movie "You've Got Mail", which isn't really that old, the other day. The premise would actually be unlikely today -- the potential sweeties wouldn't be able to carry on a conversation. |
The company said Maryland "now becomes a model for other states to follow." The new law makes it a crime to: - hack into someone else's computer to send spam;
| Without a firewall, Rantburg wouldn't be up 24 hours. |
- knowingly mislead recipients or Internet service providers about the origin of a message;
| Virtually all spam headers are forged. |
- falsify information regarding the source and routing of e-mails;
| Among the emails I had to dump by hand were a number that had me as the return address. I regularly get trojans "from" Jen, Steve White, ptah, and a few others, basically everyone whose address actually appears on the internet or in the address book of somebody who's opened a trojan. |
- use a false identity to register for 15 or more e-mail addresses and send spam from those addresses.
| Needless to say, I'm hoping to see results from the legislation. |
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