| The
Lawsuit
On
the 24th of May 2002, The Which Company (T/as T3 Direct) lodged
a writ in the District Court of Western Australia against Joseph
McNicol alleging that his supposed actions have caused financial
loss through his alleged involvement in the listing of their various
email servers on international blacklist spews.org.
What
is Spam?
Spam,
while easily confused with the canned ham found at the Supermarket
of the same name is anything but canned ham at all.
Spam
is the term commonly used to describe un-wanted or un-requested
email which arrives in someone's email box. Other names for spam
include UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) or UBE (Unsolicited Bulk
Email). As long as you call it spam, most Internet users should
know what you're talking about.
What
is the issue?
Spam is the issue. Internet users today already spend too much
time reading their email - and receiving spam is only making our
lives harder. Not only does dealing with spam rob us of valuable
time, it wastes our resources as we have to download the email with
our connections, wasting the resource we have paid for.
It
also wastes the resources of other companies including your ISP.
Your ISP has to carry this unsolicited bulk email across their networks,
wasting the bandwidth they have paid for. They also have to invest
time and money into systems which will filter spam out from email.
At
the end of the day, spammers are stealing resources which someone
else has paid for.
Why
should I care?
The
Which Company, and their various trading names including T3 Direct
and The Maverick Group, is a company which openly participates in
the practices of Spam, the sending of junk email.
As
far as I am aware, this company has been in operation at least 18
months and has been using various web-spidering techniques for the
purposes of gathering peoples' email addresses and using those addresses
collected to send unsolicited bulk email (UBE/UCE) on behalf of
their client base.
What
is a blacklist/spews.org?
A Blacklist is a database of known Internet addresses (or IP's)
used by persons or companies sending spam. Various ISP's and bandwidth
providers subscribe to these blacklist databases in order to filter
out spam sent across their network or to their subscribers.
What
can I do to help stop spam or to help the case?
At
the moment, the McNicol camp is maintaining a website with information
from them about the case. It is available at nylon legs.
They are currently accepting donations for their legal defense fund,
and will hopefully be accepting donations online very shortly.
To
stop spam, you'll need to do a bit of reading to find out more about
it. There are a few good places to start, so go over to the links
section to find who they are and their website addresses.
Information
thanks to Michael
Harris
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