From: Henk Stokhorst (Tha@wxs.nl)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 08:22:28 CST
Harvesting of emailaddresses.
A very serious issue, spam is a major downside of the internet. Solving
this matter however is not up to us. The same applies to harvesting
emailaddresses from webpages. Instead the matter should be handled by
civil law.
In The Netherlands it is illegal to drop unaddressed printed mail,
brochures or advertisement is peoples letter-box if the letterbox
carries an adhesive sticker stating : "No unaddressed mail". There are
also stickers stating: "No free newspapers". The same can be implemented
for the net.
A law could enforce people to look up an address with the providers to
see if a person has a 'digital sticker' saying 'massmailing welcome' by
sending an emailaddress to the provider. I f the address does not exist
or the person has no such 'sticker' the provider responds negative,
otherwise positive. If a person sends out spam to people without such a
sticker a complaint should have to be filed at a agency with law
enforcement capabilities. More than a dozen complaints on the same
spammer means the person's bussiness will be traced and fined. (Let's
say $10 per complaint) An amount of internation cooperation will be
needed, but for sure Europe and the US together could eliminate the
majority of the spammers by denying them access to do bussiness in there
states.
One other way I could see, is that upon posting an article to a
newsgroup, you get a relay mail address automatically from the
newsserver. The newsserver relays mailmessages as long as the message
remains on the server or so and than becomes inactive. So if you post an
article the newsserver strips your mailaddress john.smith@provider.us
and replaces it by Qw5Gdd09MaSpa@mailrelay.ournewsserver.us For a
specified amount of time mailmessages get relayed as a service and then
the temporary address vanishes, not to be used again for at least a few
years.
If you do want your real emailaddress to be posted, simply mention it in
the text or in a footer.
Yours on the Net,
Henk Stokhorst