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

[David Cary Hart]

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 13:29 -0500, 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

ISPs have the unconditional right to author their AUP which is subject
to change. To be safe, changes should be made with reasonable advance
notice and should apply to ALL customers. IMO, the only recourse that
your customer has is to take his business elsewhere.

The law defines what is prosecutable as spam. Most ISPs have AUPs that
exceed the law for valid "business reasons." You might want to contact
spamcon.org for more information.


>  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
>