************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** A slate of recent lawsuits in the United States has made it a lot harder for spammers to hide. Recently Juno Online Services, a free email company, launched lawsuits against five spammers who allegedly made it appear their unsolicited commercial email (UCE) was originating from Juno. In the old days, spamming was unsophisticated. Many spammers assumed you were eager to receive UCE. Gosh, who wouldn't want to be informed about a range of new products, services, and pornography? Naturally, only prospective customers would bother to email you back. In reality, the vast majority of replies would be from irate netizens, responding with long streams of expletives and/or 200 megabyte core files as attachments. Spammers quickly found their accounts deleted or their own email systems crashing from mail volumes. Ah, the good old days. Sophisticated spammers, if you can call them that, caught on that a valid return email address was not the best way to let the .0001% of recipients who might be interested in bogus credit repair techniques contact you (short of successfully suing everyone who has given you a poor credit rating, there are no quick methods of credit repair). To keep the massive email volumes flowing in only one direction, spammers began using snailmail P.O. Boxes for contact and fake return email addresses. For reasons I don't fully understand, many spammers don't just create a nonsense address like e-z-$@jkljl.jkj but prefer spoofing the addresses of big providers like AOL or Juno. While it may save a spammer mucho grief, it costs providers like AOL and Juno time and money dealing with flame mail. The PR loss is incalculable. If a system is picked on heavily, users with filter-equipped email prefer to trash everything appearing to come from that domain. It's better to lose one legit piece of email than wade through a dozen spams a day. In the world of "network economics," the fewer people a system reaches, the less its value. Spammers who figured large providers were too big to care ignored that large providers are big enough to have a staff of killer lawyers. As the page at www.jmls.edu/cyber/cases/spam.html reveals, companies like AOL, and now Juno, have been going after spammers misappropriating domain names. American Online, further, considers AOL.COM a trademark. It's not nice trying to earn money using someone else's trademarks. One of the more interesting cases detailed at the site is the case of Parker v. C.N. Enterprises. Tracey Parker of Austin, Texas owns the domain name "flowers.com". The fancy sounding "C.N. Enterprises" was really a front used by a college student by the name of Craig Nowak. Nowak sent out UCE using kim!@flowers.com as the return address. Email sent to any address at Parker's flowers.com address got routed to her personal email box. Parker found her personal email account overloaded and useless from complaints sent to postmaster@flowers.com. Parker used the phone number contained in Nowak's spam to ask him to cease and desist. Nowak claimed a "friend" used his system to send out the spam and he was terribly sorry. Tee hee! Parker and her upstream provider were not amused. The exclamation mark in kim! is an invalid character and caused Parker's provider to barf when it tried to resolve "kim!". Other systems connected to it started getting what is poetically known as "spew." Postmasters at those other systems began to wondered what was going on... On Nov. 10, 1997, Parker and her provider got some justice. A Texas judge demanded Nowak pay $13,000 in actual damages and $5,000 in attorney's fees. Nowak was also forbidden to spam anyone else in the future.