--On Tuesday, August 13, 2002 23:54:33 -0400 "Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <froomkin@law.miami.edu> wrote: > So maybe we need something that a spammer *could* lookup against before > sending emails, but can't use the ack/no-ack to get email addresses. And > then we make failing to do so an offense. And then start campaigning to > get this law -- which as it's less Draconian is also less controversial -- > adopted all over. this is already the legislation in .SE; in opt-out-fashion -- the marketing lobby was better at marketing their lies to the legislators than the rest of the society was at telling the truth, so we got opt-out, where the sane thing would have been opt-in. film at 11. but -- since nobody has figured out the messy particulars of implementing the system we don't have a register yet. no lookups can be made. no legal action can be taken. we tried to introduce wildcards in the system; so that an operator could say "Dear register, please block all possible e-mail addresses under our domain(s)."; as I was working at the .se registry at the time I immediately offered to register *@*.se as unwilling ;-) but that (the general wildcard idea) got rejected as well... we are dealing with very powerful lobbyists here -- please keep that in mind. even obviously sane ideas can be overthrown by massive "information" by the experienced when targeting legislators. -- Måns Nilsson http://vvv.besserwisser.org