It actually died hblair. It really didn't have any teeth in it anyways.
Congress has a problem they cannot resolve due to ignorance on thier part. You see, it is legal for anyone to send regular postal mail advertisements to anyone in the U.S. Spammers have been using that as a basis for what they do, which is what trips up Congress.
Congress has no idea how much it costs companies, like AppLink for instance, to maintain email servers and upgrades to those servers so real email can get delivered with the SPAM going on.
In my little part of the Internet, I have to have twice the email server capacity to make sure legitimate email gets delivered in a timely manner due to the amount of SPAM the server has to handle. SPAM costs me real money.
The other point is really quite simple. The U.S. Post Office makes money on the delivery of advertisements to your post box. Companies have to pay to send the stuff out. Spammers only have to pay the local ISP for a connection.
Spammers regularly commit fraud, but will go unpunished as it requires intervention of the State Attorney General, and (at least in Texas) the office will not do anything as the time it takes and costs in prosecution does not warrant thier committment.
Of course, proving someone has used an ISP service for spam is another problem. ISP's only have logs of email transactions. These logs could be easily manufactured and any defense attorney worth his salt will use that as a defense.
It would be really rather easy to shut down SPAM on the Internet, but it would take a global effort by all ISP's to do so. 2 lines in an access list in a router would almost stop it all. One to prevent access to any remote SMTP server and the other to allow only local SMTP servers to deliver email.
I have declared war on spam, much to the chagrin of many of you.
I have no desire to block legitimate email. As such, if you get a bounced email message back from HTC/AppLink with "Access denied", please post your SMTP server name or IP address in the Internet Forum. I will work with you to make sure your email gets delivered.
A tip: Do not use free email services, unless it is Yahoo or Hotmail. These two services will block spammers.
