Nobody Expects the SPAMish Inquisition! Our Chief Weapon Is Surprise … and Fake Email Addresses

There are some jittery email harvesters out there today, and it’s not because they’ve been popping herbal stimulants. Anti-spam outfit Unspam Technologies filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the cretins who collect email addresses on the Web and pass them on to spammers.

Filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., on behalf of Project Honey Pot, an alliance of 20,000 spam-fighters in more than 100 countries, the suit seeks the email harvesters’ identities and more than $1 billion in damages for violations of the CAN-SPAM Act and the Virginia Computer Crimes Act. “This isn’t just some [Internet service provider] trying to get good press, this is a community of Internet users saying we’re sick and tired of this crap and we want it to stop,” Matthew Prince, Unspam’s chief executive officer, told the Washington Post.

Don’t we all. But can a John Doe suit like this even begin to diminish spam? Lawrence Baldwin, founder of the myNetWatchman.com computer-intrusion reporting service, said it just might. “If they’re successful, I think it will yield some very usable information in terms of identifying who the real miscreants are,” Baldwin said. “Let’s just hope some of them are here in United States and therefore reachable.”