I need to rant about the scumbags that send spam. Yesterday I got 42 spams from the same dirtbag(s). Yes, 42 in one day. Luckily I use spamcop which does an incredible job of keeping my inbox free of spam while at the same time not killing legitamate email. But still, 42 in one day is beyond me. I'm even getting spam at work now. Unlike my home email account, my work email account gets mostly porn spam. That pisses me off more than anything. The first one I got was had the sender tag labeled as "michelle". I had just sent out an email to my friend Michelle, so I was sort of expecting an email from her. The subject line was fraudulent, something like "How are you?" so I opened it up. It pulled down a full web page (Why Outlook displays stuff in HTML is beyond me and the subject of a whole other rant) with a lovely young lass in what I'll tastefully describe as a "boudoir" photograph. Let me just say that the photo was anything but tasteful. By opening that email I violated company policy on several fronts; Viewing sexually explicit material on company equipment; Storing sexually explicit material on company equipment; and on some level I might have also broken California sexual harrasment laws since I talked about getting the spam with several co-workers.

So to protect me the federal government recently passed a law (CAN Spam which effectively gives spammers the right to spam me (See the spamhaus article: United States set to Legalize Spamming on January 1, 2004) ... wonderful. It also killed the California legislation that actually had some teeth.

So I've been thinking, could I use federal and state sexual harrasement laws to attack the spammers that are sending porn to my work mailbox? I'm being harrassed by unwanted sexual advances so how is this different? Unfortunately, though I haven't looked into it, I'm afraid that my only recourse would be to sue the company I work for, not the scumbag spammers (that's redundant isn't it?) that send me the crap. That's not exactly the kind of relief I'd want.