Not at all. CAUCE believes in the right to free speech, but having free speech doesn't spammers the right to force others to hear their message. CAUCE does not support the outlawing of commercial speech, but CAUCE does believe that those who wish to engage in commercial speech should either bear their own costs or limit their cost-shifting to those who have overtly affirmatively expressed a willingness to bear those costs.

This is not a new concept in the law. There is an example of this style of management already practiced in the United States. This law prohibits the sending of all unsolicited advertisements via fax machines. The law has been challenged in court stating a violation of on First AmendmentFree Speech grounds and each time courts have upheld the law because it is not censorship... it's about making the advertiser bear their own costs.

When spammers try to hide their destructive and often illegal activities behind the mask of ``Free Speech``, it is helpful to remember the words of US Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin in a case called Turner Broadcasting v. FCC where the plaintiffs sought to defend their activities on First Amendment grounds:

"[They] have come to court not because their freedom of speech is seriously threatened but because their profits are; to dress up their complaints in First Amendment garb demeans the principles for which the First Amendment stands and the protections it was designed to afford."

When spammers try to cloak their damaging, often fraudulent activities in this same First Amendment garb, all defenders of free speech should be outraged. In summary, one of the best analyses of this theme comes in a famous case about junk postal mail. In the Supreme Court's decision in Rowan v. U.S. Post Office, the court held:

"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or to view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. . . We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has the right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. . . We repeat, the right of a mailer stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."

Recently, there have been a lot of unsolicited bounces from ISPs which are created due to the following chain of events:

1. Spammer uses an infected computer on an ISP network (zombie) to send spam


2. Spam is sent with a forged sender address (aka. From), that is not hosted by the users ISP.


3. Spam is rejected during delivery to recipient mail server and the receiving ISP mail server generates a bounce to the original, forged sender.

Here are some possible solutions to this problem (your ISP may need to be involved to manage these recomendations):

1. Use some form of authentication on your domain; SPF, Sender ID or Domain Keys Identified Mail.
   While these solutions will not solve the bounces coming into your network, but will help ISPs checking messages supporting these solutions determine if the original messages that they are receiving (and subsequently sending a bounce to you) are from your network.


2. Implement a solution like BATV for your own messages, to help determine legitimate bounces from your network, this allows you to ignore all bounces received that do not comply with your configuration.

There are many ways in which spammers can get your email address. (no order)

• From harvesting posts to UseNet, webpages, blogs, chat rooms or other easily accessed forms
• From mailing lists, contest pages or free offer sites
• Compromised websites, phishing domains or chain letter scams (i.e forward to ten friends plus this address for a free copy of <software>)
• Viruses built to harvest address books that you might be listed in
• By guessing, commonly referred to as a dictionary attack
• Buying, renting or trading email lists from each other, disgruntled employees or List Brokerage companies
• By scanning domain registration contact information listed in whois
• Using social engineering to acquire information
• Internet directories, profile pages and social networking sites
• From a previous owner of a recycled email address

If you want to take legal action against the spammer, you'll first want to check and see if there are any laws in your state that you can use. The best places to look are law.spamcon.org, and spamlaws.com, which keeps track of current and proposed state laws. Several corporations, ISPs and Individuals have launched cases against spammers, you can find additional information on them here: spamsuite.com.

If you don't have any legal options, then at the very least you'll want to complain to the spammer's ISP so that you can get their account cancelled. Here are a few useful resources:

• "Tracking Spammers: A Step-by-Step Guide" from the authors of Internet Privacy for Dummies
• The SPAM-L FAQ - Tracking spammers
• Fighting E-mail Spammer

If the spammer's ISP refuses to take action against the spammer and/or their website, then, as a last resort, you may wish to file an RBL nomination against the ISP involved.

You can find out more about the RBL at mail-abuse.org.

The definition of "spam" is a tricky issue. The Wikipedi defines spam as “e-mail that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients.” Others believe "bulkiness" is irrelevant, it's merely a matter of whether the message was sent with the consent or knowledge of the recipient. Many other debates center around the content of the message and weather bulk is relevant to the commercial content of the message.

Due to the nature of Internet email technology, each email message, whether it is bulk or not, whether it is solicited or not, whether it is commercial or not, costs the recipient more than it costs the sender in terms of both money and resources. These are facts that make the definition of spam very tricky and lead to several differing view points on this topic.

As the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, we believe the largest and most pressing problem is unsolicited commercial email (UCE). This decision is mostly one of political necessity: there is substantial concern raised by proposals that could affect non-commercial speech. While many of us believe there is a strong legal case to be made for treating non-commercial spam (such as political or religious spam) no differently, today's US Congress simply does not have the political will to go after those who cannot be shown to be subsidizing their commercial activities on the unwilling backs of others. This is not to say that unsolicited email of any content, sent once or in bulk, isn't a part of the spam issue as a whole. CAUCE has simply chosen to limit our efforts to UCE. Thus, CAUCE has chosen to cut off one slice of the spam problem and address it first, however this does not imply that other forms of email abuse will be ignored or avoided.

The United States Government divided email, in the CAN-SPAM act of 2003, into two classes; Commercial email and Transactional email. These are defined as something that a reasonable consumer would understand to be selling or marketing a product (ex: Up-sell or new product information) and something that is offering a transactional response (ex: billing receipt, support ticket)