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You are here: Home > Law > Spam > Crackdown

Crackdown

Because it still violated the spirit of the Net and netiquette, the entities using the tactic tended to be off-mainstream, such as pornographic sites, pyramid marketing and get rich quick schemes. The online and Internet service providers found their networks clogged with unwanted mail. Members complained and the Internet and online industry responded.

First the providers demanded that the spammers cease and desist from using their networks for spam. When most of the spammers ignored their demands, they developed filtering applications, to filter out e-mail sent from known spammers.

The spammers countered with their own technology and began using sender aliases, to by-pass the filters. At the same time, with the growing enormity of bulk e-mailing lists, came an increasing number of undeliverable spam messages.

When a message is undeliverable, it is returned to the sender, which resulted in the spammers being deluged with returned spam. So, the use of the alias e-mail sender addresses shifted the deluge to whomever was designated as the sender. And if they used a made up sender's address, the "sender's" designated provider received the undeliverable responses and returned spam. That resulted in America Online, Juno and CompuServe receiving millions of returned spam messages, which taxed their systems and hogged data space on their servers. Since no legislation existed protecting the service providers or spam recipients, Internet service providers and online service providers had to rely on common law arguments to stop the barrage of e-mail. The online service providers (such as America Online, Prodigy and CompuServe) have successfully fought the battle against spam using traditional legal arguments of trespass and fraud.

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