From: bruce@ais.com (Bruce C. Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: Question about unsolicited Internet Email.
Date: 7 Oct 92 23:13:04 GMT
Organization: Applied Information Systems, Chapel Hill, NC

In article <5=gp=8k@dixie.com>, jgd@dixie.com (John De Armond) writes:
> c23st@kocrsv01.delcoelect.com (Spiros Triantafyllopoulos) writes:
>>a. make sure the incident (mistake :-)) does not happen again from the 
>>   original site
> 
>>b. make sure that others are discouraged again from trying the same
>>   thing
> 
> Surely you don't think it had either effect, do you?  You don't REALLY
> think malicious mailbombing does anything except make people mad, do you?
> Since the mailer's original actions are perfectly legal while malicious 
> retalliation can constitute any number of criminal offences here in
> the US, someone victimized by this mailbombing who chooses to be
> agressive could cause a lot of people a lot of problems.

As others have pointed out, malicious mailbombing can't have much of
a deterrent effect because only people not familiar with the net are
likely to engage in junk e-mail.  John is probably correct that malicious
mailbombs could conceivably violate US law and/or be grounds for civil
action, depending on how much trouble they caused.  But if a lot of
disconnected people each sent one or two `mailbombs' (like copies of
all the Unix `man' pages for example), the `crime' or `tort' would be
so diffuse that a successful court case would be difficult at best.
Most prosecutors have more important cases to try (especially since
most of these would involve crossing State lines, which would most likely
mean having to bring the case in Federal court), and the cost of bringing
that many civil cases, each of which is tiny by itself, would be
prohibitive.

However, I'm not so sure that what the original mailer did was legal
either.  We all know it violates various usenet/Bitnet guidelines, but
that's not the same thing as being illegal.  (Grounds for having traffic
from your site summarily rejected by the other members of the net perhaps,
but the courts couldn't care less;  there's not even any implied contract
dispute to settle).  _Maybe_ you would have grounds for trying to get
compensated for any phone charges, but I wouldn't be very optimistic
since you volunteered to receive e-mail.  But they apparently were
sending the material over just about every network gateway available;
and some of these other networks (mostly Government) have explicit legal
sanctions against commercial use of their facilities.

I don't think people should go ballistic over incidents like this -- if
someone is flagrantly violating the net guidelines, then those guidelines
should be explained to them;  and if they refuse to listen, then everyone
downstream from them should simply pull the plug.  For sufficient pig-
headedness (and this probably qualifies), the first step (reasoning with
the offender) could be dispensed with.  But things like mailbombs are just
going to cause a lot of the same kind of trouble for all the sysadmins
between you and the intended target (who probably won't care or understand
anyway ... after all, the whole reason they got into this in the first
place is that they are clueless).

It will happen again.  Let's not stoop to their level by being childish.

Bruce C. Wright
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc