E-Mail Giants Join in Court to Fight Spammers

Jonathan Krim has another article on the spam wars:

The nation's four largest e-mail account providers yesterday announced a coordinated legal attack on spammers, using a new federal law to file six lawsuits in courts around the country.

The suits by America Online, EarthLink Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. target what their lawyers called some of the largest spam operations, accounting for hundreds of millions of e-mails hitting their networks every month.

This is certainly good news; but I think we make an error in treating unsolicited commercial e-mail as an Internet problem. The Internet is the medium, the problem is financial and criminal. Most unsolicited commercial e-mail is fraudulent and actionable under existing law. As in, why aren't these guys in jail?

It is also a financial problem. From my article in the Capitol Image:

Nothing in this writer’s research has explained why VISA, Mastercard, et al, tolerate spammers. Without  credit cards spamming would not be possible. So why do these companies traffic with such operators? We need to make this a customer relations issue.