Epilogue

But we are not done. As we noted on Wednesday, Virginia's anti-spam law makes fraudulent and excessive spam a felony on July 1st. On that date we plan to remove the server filters and collect at least 10,000 fraudulent spam messages. Then we will forward them to our ISP and the state's Commonwealth Attorney for investigation and, hopefully, prosecution.

However, this probably still won't adequately resolve the problem. Neither will carelessly-assembled blacklists as noted during this week's 3-day FTC spam conference [Dana Baggett via CNet]. Our domain is probably blacklisted because of the 100,000's, perhaps even millions, of spam that have fraudulently used our domain as a "From" or "Return" address. Here's a NY Times article covering the first day of the conference [Dana Baggett].

Access to the tools of those who send fraudulent email needs to be controlled as well. For example, domain name registrars like VeriSign's Network Solutions and Tucows need to be required by law to maintain accurate registration information, to de-register those domains of those who do not and to de-register those domains that are fraudulently using others' email addresses as their own "From" or "Return" addresses.

Finally, victims of such fraud should have access to the federal torts court to recover significant punitive damages from the frauds' perpetrators and beneficiaries.

[Update 7am EDT] AppleWorks 6.2.5/6.2.7 International English Version is now available for download. [Robert Horwood]