Thursday, March 07, 2002
A message to a spammer
Spam is pretty much a constant now but for some reason this particular piece of spam got on my nerves:
- From
- none@conman.org
- Reply-To
- none@conman.org
- To
- sean@conman.org
- Subject
- none
- Sender
- none@conman.org
- Date
- Thu, 7 Mar 2002 22:29:42 -0500
——you are recieving this message because you responded to a posted advertisement. if you are recieving this and did not respond to an advertisement please send an e-mail to m0neyhungry_19@yahoo.com to be REMOVED———
Dear Friend,
I am looking for 10 people that are willing to dedicate 5-15 hours a week. I will personally be there, every step of the way, to assist you on your journey, whether your goals include more free time, more money in your pocket, or just overall happiness, I would like to help you.
Blah blah blah. It goes on and I'm not going to waste space here sending out this person's message of wealth and happiness. So a little bit of searching, and I find Spam Laws, a site that has all the current anti-spam legislation currently enacted or being worked on. Quite a nice site and it allowed me to send the following back to the spammer:
To whom it may concern:
I did not wish to receive this information, nor have I responded to a posted advertisement from this address. I wish to advise you that you are fortunate in having sent this email from a facility located in Indiana, which has no current laws against unsolicited email, to a facility located in Florida, which has no current laws against unsolicited email that apply in this case. But a majority of the states have enacted laws against unsolicited email that make you liable for criminal prosecution, especially in reguards to forged headers and routing information:
- Return-Path
- <none>
- Received
- from yourwebsite.com (XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX[XXXXXXXXXXXXXX]) by conman.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id WAA03767 for <sean@conman.org>; Thu, 7 Mar 2002 22:29:43 -0500
- From
- none@conman.org
- Message-Id
- <200203080329.WAA03767@conman.org>
- Reply-To
- none@conman.org
- To
- sean@conman.org
- Subject
- none
- Sender
- none@conman.org
- Date
- Thu, 7 Mar 2002 22:29:42 -0500
You have currently forged the email from a user on this system (whether it is a real account or not is irrelevent—this is plainly a forged header) which, had I or you been in Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington or West Virginia you could have faced criminal charges. Furthermore, under California, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, West Virginia or Wisconsin you may face criminal charges for misleading or mislabeling the email on the subject line, as you clearly have done above.
On the other hand, if I can prove that your email message was routed through any network in Iowa you may be liable under Iowa law section 714E.1 subsection 5 but truth be told it may be difficult actually conduct such a case, but it is possible.
I do request that you remove the email address “sean@conman.org” from your list as I do not wish to receive any futher unsolicited email from you.
Thank you for your time and consideration of this matter.
Sean Conner
I can't wait to see the response to this.
