Legalities of spam

I am currently investigating what appears to be abuse of my email server by a spammer.

I live in the UK and my server is based in Hastings, UK so i'm covered under the European anti-spam legislation. This is a law which prohibits the sending of spam from within Europe.

My server has been breached by a known spam organisation from China. My hands are in the air on this one - I just aint as clever with email servers as they are. I have now drafted in support from the server host and so hopefully i'll get the loopholes closed soon.

What interests me is the legalities of it. I can prove I didn't send the emails so I am pretty sure i'm in the clear, but are the spammers?

Bearing in mine that the system they abused is a web page form, so they wrote the emails directly into the web page hosted on my site which is in the UK. That makes it sound like my web page was rigged for sending mass emails, it wasn't, and I dont actually understand how they're doing it (which is why i've got the server host helping me to solve it).

Also maybe of relevance is a forum sticky message for the attention of spammers which highlights the server operates under UK law (http://www.bansheestudios.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=180).

Can I legally prosecute under UK/European law? Are they operating under Chinese law?

I have a sort of plan B, what with China's premier visit to the PM and their attempt to curry favour with us atm it might be a good time to show a Chinese business squashing a free software hobbyist by illicit means, a story which I could give the embassy a chance to resolve first - it's a long shot but if I can get in before their premier heads home it might work.

Short version: You're screwed. Sorry.

Long version:
If they are really in China, they are operating under Chinese law.

Chances of being able to do anything about it or getting any kind of restitution: absolutely 0, if not less than that.

Even if through devine intervention you can get the attention of the proper authorities to take action, you'll find that in all likelyhood the spam in question was relayed through a zombied chinese broadband connection, so what you view as the source really isn't where it originated either. Almost all evidence trails in these kind of cases are dead ends.

There's a reason only a handful of cases against spammers have been prosecuted so far -- there are countless billions of these kind of messages being pumped through everyone and their grandma's systems on a daily base, but unless you are AOL or MSN and you can 'prove' that a single person/company is directly responsible for a couple of hundred million messages sent through your system, you can forget about any compensation or punishment of the guilty party.

Especially Chinese IP space it notoriously unresponsive to complaints to upstream providers, etc.

The only thing you can really do is apply filters, block IP's, restrict access to who / which site can call your formmailer scripts, and hope that whoever is behind this gets struck in the back of the head by a freak meteor shower.

Think about it -- even huge companies with millions of customers fighting spam for years can't really do anything about these people, you as an independent really don't stand a chance.

Sorry. :-?

(I've been on the receiving end of a bunch of this crap too, in the past. Some spammer did a spam run using auto-generated email addresses on my domain in the from: line, AKA a 'joe-job'. I got probably about 50,000 delivery failure notifications, and a few dozen very @#!*ed complaints to me & my ISP from recipients who thought I was the one who spammed them. Luckily my own ISP completely understood and knew that I had nothing to do with it.

I tried in vain to lodge a complaint with the Washington state attorney general (I'm a resident there, and Washington state had a state law against forging headers in spam messages, complaints to be brought to the attorney general) but multiple attempts to reach them resulted in absolutely zero response or even acknowledgement. Same for the attorney general office in Texas, where the spammer was located. In the end I pretty much gave up trying, even though I was able to track down the phone number, name & address etc. of the spammer in question. His 'offer' to make it up to me was to send out a million messages on my behalf for free. Talk about some nerve.

Becky..I'm living and working quite some time in Asia (Japan, Malaysia mostly), and I went few times in to China, becouse of some business issues..and trust me..there is no rule at all..and if we talking about law, esspecially one focused on to internet rights, dont even think about it...thats my suggestion..Japan, Malaysia, Australia ok, but rest of the guys here..whoaaa..beter forget about it..

Getting rid of spam is like getting rid of junk mail through your letterbox.
Aka impossible.

ENAY I think you mean i.e. as AKA is like an alias e.g. Superman AKA clark kent ;-) but hey, whatever!

hahahaahah

You're joking, right? The UK is kissing China's ass, not the other way around.

<brushes human rights violation under the Red carpet>

Well, I said it was a long shot...

@Enay: I get no spam mail any more, well, apart from companies I actually do business with who can ignore the opt-outs. I get very little spam email too because I take quite a lot of care with my address, if I sign up to anything - like this forum - I sign up as blitz@....

Unfortunately I have made a mistake somewhere as I get about 4 spam emails a week, but that's not too bad on the whole.

The problem here is something else entirely though. This is one that's going to land me with a bandwidth bill, which makes the crime fraud.

Actually, in Norway, it's possible the reserve yourself from recieving unaddressed mail..

in addition, you can also reserve yourself from telephone sales..
which means that if anyone calls you up and try to sell you something, they're breaking the law, and can be prosecuted..

Haigh LarsG,

We have a similar post & phone opt-out systems here, but it's operated by a trade body and is not law so the worst that happens to offenders is a slap on the wrist.

However they do seem to be working for me at the moment, and I guess if companies started ignoring the tradebody it would then later become law - so the system wont break down until too many people use the opt-out and the companies start ignoring the tradebody to stay profitable.