Re: Vendors spamming NANOG attendees

[Mel Beckman <mel () beckman org>]

Rodney,

You make a good point. But I wonder how often spammers are so obvious, and I wonder if his "leveraging" falls amiss of 
CAN-SPAM's specific prohibition:


(I) harvesting electronic mail addresses of the users of a website, proprietary service, or other online public forum 
operated by another person, without the authorization of such person; and

(II) randomly generating electronic mail addresses by computer;

Technically, this spammer harvested the names of attendees at a physical conference, not of some online resource, which 
is what CAN-SPAM prohibits. I know it's splitting hairs, but that's what spammers do.

My point is that CAN-SPAM is virtually useless. There have been a handful of prosecutions in more than a decade, and 
spammers are not seeming to be deterred.

I know there are honeypots that try to catch electronic harvesters, but I don't think they could provide proof of 
someone who got his emails from a list of attendees at an event, a shared customer list, etc.

 -mel

On Jun 14, 2017, at 5:26 AM, Rodney Joffe <rjoffe () centergate com<mailto:rjoffe () centergate com>> wrote:



On Jun 13, 2017, at 10:28 PM, Mel Beckman <mel () beckman org<mailto:mel () beckman org>> wrote:

But as I said, harvesting emails is not illegal under can spam. And the requirement to not send you UCE to harvested 
emails is pointless, because how do you prove that someone did that?

Because he said so?

The spammer had the balls to say, in his email:


We do not know each other. I'm leveraging the attendee list for NANOG to reach out and raise awareness of the value of 
OCS (Optical Circuit Switching) in the data center and in particular, the Carrier Neutral Hotel where we've been active 
with next generation MeetMeRoom discussions.