OT: Political Spam - what can you do about it?

[Temlakos]

Doug,

I can't imagine whom you're talking about. But--and I don't mean to tell
you how to do your job, or even to pretend that I know all that's
*relevant* to your job--it seems to me that, so long as you publish
clear and readily available Acceptable Use Policies (AUP), you can
"fire" any customer who violates them. In general, "I don't want to hear
about it" ought to be the last word, and any conduct that fails to
respect that completely just strikes me as downright unneighborly. Sure,
you want to retain people's custom, but in fact I'm sure that you want
to retain the longest-term custom of the greatest number of customers.
And so anyone who makes life unpleasant for other customers harms you
and is better gone.

Those statutes you mentioned sound to me as though they treat only the
"grounds for civil or criminal prosecution." Are you *sure* they also
treat the kinds of AUP that you may or may not enforce? These are
separate issues--that much law I do know--and maybe your corporate
counsel ought to take a closer look.

My $0.02 US, anyway.

Temlakos

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 14:29, redhat wrote:
> I have a customer on our system (we're local ISP) that fancies himself
> quite the political spinmeister.  He absolutely inundates people with
> his (what I call) SPAM email.  We have received numerous complaints
> about this guy from all over the US (mostly colleges that he targets)
> requesting that this guy be shut down.  He even "attacked" me one day
> not knowing who I was and told me that he would sue us if we tried to
> take his email privileges away and gave me a link to some government
> site with various documents on what "is" email spam and what is "not"
> email spam.  Apparently (I read all of the docs) when the lawmakers
> created this anti-spam law they removed the label "spam" from anything
> that is political in nature (so they could use it themselves and be
> above the law).  It would appear that this guy has me beaten but I just
> can't stand to sit back and watch this guy annoy other domains the way
> that he does.  Does anyone else out there have any "knowledge" or
> insight on this issue or can give me a link to some good resources? I
> have already scoured the ".gov" sites and it doesn't look good.
> thanks,
> Doug