Alan Ralsky Gripes About Can Spam Act

fdiskne1 writes "The New York Times has an interview with Alan Ralsky, commonly known as the world's worst spammer. CNet News.com is running the same interview. Ralsky admits using open relays and virus-infected PCs and not honoring unsubscribe lists. He complains about having to comply with the new CAN-SPAM law will cost him an additional $3000 in costs to set up a genuine opt-out list. Anyone here feel sorry for him? Okay, I'm biased, but I can't wait until we see him in prison."

Well duh..

"The law was not written for a commercial e-mailer," he said. "I don't think what they are doing is fair."

I think that's the point, Mr. Ralsky..

Re:Anyone have his pic, and an address?

Here's a start [216.239.39.104]

Alan Ralsky's brand new 8,000-square-foot luxury home near Halsted and Maple in West Bloomfield has been a busy place this month.......It's an operation still very much in business, despite last month's much-hyped settlement of a lawsuit against Ralsky by Verizon Internet Services. The suit used Virginia's tough anti-spam laws to get Ralsky to promise to stop using Verizon servers and pay an undisclosed fee for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails to its customers.

Re:Anyone have his pic, and an address?

Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam. It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened. "This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.

Want to bet that was Windows Messenger? (no, not the IM service, the net send command in DOS)

Re:Anyone have his pic, and an address?

Name: Alan Murray Ralsky
6747 Minnow Pond Dr,
West Bloomfield, MI 48322

AKA: Alan Ralsky
5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322
248-661-3355

photograph [cmsconnect.com]

more [wonker.com]

Re:Spammers create jobs (NT)

But he *DOES* create jobs. This statement is correct. Look around and you'll see how many companies are developing anti-spam programs.

The same way as viruses writers create jobs at antiviruses companies.

The same way as wars create jobs, and it's a billionaire industry. Yes, at the expenses of human lifes, but what's some measly human lifes compared to gross money ?

Re:Spammers create jobs (NT)

As an asside, spam would be an excellent way to communicate with terrorist sleeper cells. Nobody reads it, everybody gets it. Nobody could tell that a message was even sent. If somehow they did know, they wouldn't know to whom it was sent. Ever notice the random words or characters added to spam to attempt to fool spam filters? It would be trivial to make it a code instead.

Breaking windows creates jobs too...

(*Glass* windows, not Microsoft Windows, which arrives already broken.)

Bastiat, the ~1870s French economist, was probably not the first person to explain this fallacy [wikipedia.org], but he's the best-known. Sure, successful spammers create some jobs, but they also destroy other jobs, as well as wasting everybody's time and annoying everyone.

All I can say is...

DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!!!!!!

Well, ok maybe he doesn't deserve death. But he definitely deserves a very hefty fine and prison cell with Bubba.

Re:Yeah...

calling for the brutal anal rape of Ralsky is disgusting, uncivilized, pointless, and, frankly, disturbing.
... but justified...

Re:Yeah...

> > calling for the brutal anal rape of Ralsky is disgusting, uncivilized, pointless, and, frankly, disturbing.
>
> ... but justified...

Hardly.

I mean, some poor mass murderer is actually going to have to fuck Alan Ralsky!

Where's the justice in that? The guy's already serving life in prison for mass murder, shouldn't that be punishment enough?

Re:All I can say is...

I'm leaning toward "enemy combatant" status, and of course death but only after 20 years in Guantanamo Bay. Thats right let the terrorist go, I don't consider them a threat. On the other hand, spammers have attempted to kill me on at least two occasions. Once with the subject "loose 100 lbs" I only way 135 lbs (idiot spammers) that would kill me. Another time with the subject "become 20 years younger" I'm only 20 years old, WTF, that would kill me too.

Re:All I can say is...

Actually, if you used both the products at the same time, you'd probably survive. But you'd be one fat infant.

A face to match up under cross-hairs...

The geek way to stop spam:

Step 1: Create a mod for a popular first person shooter game involving a list of prolific spammer and relistic weapons.

Step 2: Distribute said game to those "evil teenagers that plays too much video games and get influenced and shoot up their classmates".

Step 3: Wait for problem to take care of itself.

That way loosers who shoot their classmates and random people are *educated* to shoot the actual varmints of this society instead of random innocent people. And for the rest of us who can learn to differentiate a game from real life, it does sound like a fun game... :-)

Re:Prison Rape

There is another aspect that escapes most people. Is prison truly a punishment for physically intimidating rapists, child molesters and other sex criminals? Yeah, murderers get their "just desserts" but the rapist has been sent to smorgasbord heaven. How wonderful and considerate of the state to provide him with an endless stream of victims.

Re:All I can say is...

Death to spammers has been the prevalent sentiment on the anti-spam message boards, including the Usenet group NANAE for some time.

The entire system of crime and punishment, at least in the USA, has been the notion of "let the punishment fit the crime". In it's purest form, the concept of modern law is to "set right that which was wronged", in other words, allow the law to compensate a person or other entity to the point before the offense. That is the concept of compensatory damages; punitive damages awarded the wronged serve to further punish the offender.

How a rational person can equate being wronged by receiving unsolicited emails calling for the death penalty for the sender, and say, the punishment that will befall the killer of Laci Peterson is beyond me.

There will come a time when some overzealous anti-spammer will decide to take the law into their own hands, and physically attack a spammer. A taste of that was seen last spring at the Federal Trade Commission summit on spam in DC. Others have made thinly veiled threats to destroy computer server centers, and it is only a matter of time before someone decides to act on their impulses.

If nothing else, any lawyer would counsel against making statements on public Internet sites that may come back to haunt a person later. The First Amendment is fine, it's up to the individual to decide when their statements are free speech, or incriminating evidence.

What punishment (provided Ralsky would be convicted on an offense) do I believe he should get? Compensatory damages equal to the total cost of bandwidth, server space, etc. that he has used sending out emails over the years, and punitive damages ten times the compensatory amount. In the end, instead of living in Bloomfield Hills, he'll be on the corner of Second and Forest, bumming for spare change.

Re:All I can say is...

Make an example out of them. Nothing says obey me like a bloody head on a stick.

Re:All I can say is...

First, I think everyone knows that the "death penalty" is entirely hyperbole.

That said, there are about 2.5Gs in an 80-year human lifetime. Ralsky boasts of something like 70 million spams per day. If it takes a human being 1 second to delete a spam, that's one human lifetime wasted per 36 days of spamming. Okay, filters help a lot -- but those filters also cost people-time to create. Aside from that, even if only 5% gets through to a human, he's wasted 1 whole human lifetime in 2 years.

So, what would be a compensory penalty? The 80 years (more than the rest of his life) at community service would be a start. But that doesn't account for all the cleanup of the zombies he relayed through, nor the ISP resources (mailbox space and bandwidth). It also doesn't compensate the public for the loss in usefulness of email.

In Ralsky's case, he cannot possibly afford to compensate for what he's done. But there is more to justice than compensation and punishment. Justice also requires Mercy.

He's 57 years old now. He can collect social security in five years. Let him. (In the mean time, he can sell his big house and move into a small appartment thats easier to afford. Maybe Sanford Wallace is looking for a roomie?) But after he has to start tagging his spam, it'll be so easy to filter that nobody will pay him to send it. I cannot imagine anyone hiring him to work. So, he'll fade into obscurity, and justice will be served by his repentance and remorse.

Except, he's a spammer, so he'll more likely break the can-spam law, and do those next five years in prison (I assume, based on his open admission to news reporters that he uses zombies, that there will be some wiretaps in place by Jan 2 at the latest.) When he gets out, he has the same choice to make all over again.

What an ass

Wow.

"I personally hate mailing with proxies," he said. "It's rough. But you do what you got to do."

and

"I have changed the way we mail totally," he said. The spam fighters, he added, "have no idea what I'm mailing. They could never pinpoint it and say this is from Al Ralsky."

Ralsky said that he was uncomfortable about this deception, but that he had no choice. "Is putting bogus information in your registrations the right way to do business?" he asked. "No. But the Internet world has forced me to do that."

He doesn't seem to realize or care that what he's doing is wrong. It's like a mugger complaining, "Is putting on a ski mask the right way for me to make a living? No, but the world of people who don't wish to be robbed at gunpoint in a dark alley has forced me to do this."

Or,

"I personally hate clubbing old ladies over the head so I can snatch their purses. It's rough. But you do what you got to do."

I hope somebody clubs Al Ralsky over the head in a dark alley... Jerk.

You'll find the same thing all over...

He even went so far as to say, if you dont want my stuff, I dont want to send it to you.

Every spammer says this, but remember the first rule of dealing with spammers: Spammers lie.

Spammers say they don't want to send spam to people who don't want it, then come up with ways to subvert spam filters. If the really didn't want to send spam to people who didn't want it, then why subvert a spam filter? Someone using a filter obviously doesn't want spam (by definition), yet spammers keep bitching about filters, and how they're making their line of work difficult.

Re:You'll find the same thing all over...

The law needs to treat circumvention of a spam filter the way it treats circumvention of any other computer security measure -- do it for the purpose of gaining unauthorized access to somebody else's system, do 5-10 years in prison (real don't-drop-the-soap prison, not Club Fed).

Re:Calling him an ass for those quotes wreaks of..

It is physical. Bandwidth is a limited, measurable resource. You can only get so much data through the medium and equipment you purchase. CPU cycles are also limited.

Maybe you can try an experiment and steal some electricity. By your way of thinking it doesn't exist in physical form either so you should be just fine.

1-800-WAA-AAHH!

Call some one who gives a shit Alan Ralsky.

Good for you

Good for you, but not so good for others

I receive around 70,000 spam messages to my account monthly...I use TMDA...AT LEAST 75% of the email received here is spam

In other words, you send out over fifty thousand "challenge" emails a month, most all of which will be to innocent third parties who were unfortunate enough to be joe-jobbed. Not only are you bombarding others' inboxes with crap they never asked for, you are effectively doubling your own bandwidth consumed by spam. TMDA not only doesn't solve the spam problem, it actively makes the situation worse.

In Prison?

I can't wait to see him wresting bread crusts from sea gulls in a K Mart parking lot. He's an excellent example of a selfish individual and capitalism at its worst.

In congress? Senate? No! Whitehouse!

"He's an excellent example of a selfish individual and capitalism at its worst."

Sounds like the ideal candidate for President...

Logically.....

Spammers are stupid
+
Ralsky is a pammer
=
Ralsky is stupid

Ralsky is stupid
+
Ralsky says "it would be stupid to violate" [the law]
=
Ralsky will violate the law

But I'll bet you'd figured that out anyway.

Back up a second, here....

Wasn't CAN-SPAM meant to help spammers? I mean, it had loopholes large enough to fly a 747 through, for Christ's sakes.... so why is he complaining?

Spammers were given a choice

There's a perfectly reasonable convention of prefixing adverts with [ADV] in the subject line so people who dont want to read them dont have to.

If they aren't going to play fair then i dont see why we should. We need to make sure that the financial penalties outweigh the potential profits to be made. If it's a small penalty per email sent, then it'd take a while to whittle away ralskys fortunes.

We need to make an example of people breaking these laws to act as a deterrent. Perhaps a 3 emails and your up for life in prison....

That's nothing. These new laws. . .

allowing people to opt-out of burglery, robbery, extortion and murder are killing me. I'm just trying to make a living. Do the law makers even realize that I have to let people go when they pass laws like this? It's costing jobs during an economic downturn. It doesn't make any sense.

On the other hand, the price controls on recreational drugs and prostitution are a partial compensation, but the state monopoly on gambling really put a crimp in my style.

What's the world coming to.

Well, at least I'm not a scum sucking spammer.

KFG

personally

I wouldn't give this prick a moment of time bothering to read what bs he has to say. I would like to say though, what makes anyone truly believe any law passed will stop spammers? It's different if you were sending fines to those who's products are being sold, but spammers are doing the same thing telemarketers, and flyer distributors do. Only more annoying.

What the hell does anyone think some low life e-tard in Nigeria or South America care about American laws and spam, nada. Zilch zip nada. The law is a farce and being that its coming close to election, I'm wondering if it was solely sent through for whoring purposes...

Contact your AGs NOW

Here is a list of the Attorney Generals [naag.org] around the country and the world. Everyone should contact their AG and demand that they prosecute these crimes. Until the public puts pressure on the authorities to enforce the crimes these spammers commit, nothing is going to change.

Laws can't fix something this broken.

Security by law sits right next to security by obscurity on the list of things that help a bit, but by no means make a complete solution. Making spamming illegal isn't going to stop spammers, because sending spam by a virus-infected computer is already illegal since virus writing is illegal too... those laws haven't allowed us to stop running anti-virus programs, have they?

The bottom line is that SMTP has got to go. We need to get wide adoption of an e-mail protocol with authentication that the "from" address being claimed belongs to the sender of the message. That's the only way to make sure that spammers lose their ability to send e-mail without reprocussions. The face-value "from" address has to be much more relaiable than the current system lets it be.

Worst spammer?

The New York Times has an interview with Alan Ralsky, commonly known as the world's worst spammer...Ralsky admits using open relays and virus-infected PCs and not honoring unsubscribe lists.

From that description it sounds like he's a pretty damn good spammer. The world's worst spammer is probably some guy trying to send spam through his AOL account.

1. New e-mail
2. Paste address
3. Paste body
4. Send e-mail
5. Dismiss popup ad
6. New e-mail
7. etc etc
8. Profit!

No, I think ol' Alan is good at what he does. Of course that's like arguing who was the best serial killer...

Re:Take the Spam Lists with You

I run a large corporate mail system - about 25000 user accounts.

I can NOT operate a mail server in this day and age without the use of these blocklists. We use a highly elaborate system rbls - spamhaus, njabl, ordb, along with others and some of my own design - as well as spamassassin and virus filters. Of the > 1000000 emails we process dailt, better than 85% is spam by every metric you choose to go by. I still get tons of it in my mailbox since the 'postmaster' and other administrative addresses are posted in spider-friendly plain text on our websites (I've complained to no avail).Think about that - I get 1 milllion emails a day running through my mail server, 850000 of which are spam.

A few weeks ago, easynet.nl's rbls were taken down, whom I was using as my only means of blocking mails from dynamic ranges, as well as one of my open proxy lists. The load on our mail server went through the roof as we were flooded with hundreds of thousands of junk mails poring in from dynamically assigned ip ranges and hijacked proxies, all of which have NO BUSINESS WHATSOEVER sending my users their garbage.

You have to understand that Ralsky and his criminal contemporaries are costing businesses like mine billions of dollars. Billions with a "B". The authorities have so far proven incapable of dealing with this problem, and this new law won't change a fucking thing. While blocklists are hardly perfect, it's one of the most effective tools I have at my disposal to limit the ammount of money Ralsky and his kind can steal from me and my employers on any given day.

I don't give a rat's ass if you and your "online business" can't adequately manage a confirmed opt-in mailing list. Either hire someone to do it, or get off the 'net until you can.

So HE thinks it's unfair...?!

Good Lord above... What about the millions of private E-mail boxes, privately-owned servers, and God only knows how many other computing resources, belonging to other people, that Ralsky and his spamming butt-buddies have already abused, and CONTINUE to abuse in some cases?

I would be very interested in hearing how "fair" the owners of all those resources think the new law is. Oh, granted, said law is far from perfect. However, if it helps to force criminals like Ralsky out of business for good, I will be the first to give it a round of applause.

Ralsky's misguided belief that he has any right at all to abuse property that does not belong to him is typical of the spammer mindset. The sooner he, Scotty 'Snotty' Richter, Eddy Marin, and all their spamming ilk get shut down permanently, the better off the Internet will be.

Ralsky isn't the problem...

...he's just a symptom. Imprison him and someone else will pick up his lost business contacts and opportunities. U.S. laws will simply mean his revenue taxes will go to some other country.

What we need is to get rid of the "demand" end of this issue. Tighten up email so it requires at least some level of authorization to send to someone else, even if it's just by having a certificate of trust or something.

I didn't mean to kill the family...

The saddest thing is he uses the same excuse as the spouse batterer, the child molester, and the fascist ruler:
Mr. Ralsky said that he was uncomfortable about this deception, but that he had no choice. "Is putting bogus information in your registrations the right way to do business?" he asked. "No. But the Internet world has forced me to do that."

Why do people still think this is a valid excuse. I am sorry I killed my husband but he didn't use a coaster. I am sorry i killed my child but she kept crying. I am sorry I killed one million people, but they were in the way.

No one makes you do something. You make a choice. You make a choice to go to school or not. You make a choice to go to work or not. You make a choice to live an honest life or not. You make the choice, and you should be man or woman enough to stand by them and take responsibility. Not be yet another sorry excuse for a human and say "I don't recall" or "I didn't know" or "I was ordered to".

Re:I didn't mean to kill the family...

I'm sorry I killed 9,000 Iraqi civilians, but they had weopons of mass destruction (or at least I thought they did).

He's playing the media and lawmakers like a fiddle

What else would Ralsky say about this new "tough" spam law? Did anyone else ever tell their parents after a spanking, "Didn't hurt, didn't hurt!"? What was the result? After getting a harder spanking that did indeed hurt, children quickly learn to pretend to feel pain to avoid a worse punishment.

I think Ralsky is openly complaining about the slight inconveniences this law has caused in order to affirm this law as effective, hoping to avoid tougher legislation that would actually hinder his "business" practices.

Who minds receiving adverts?

In general i'm not too bother about regular dead tree advertising. In general it's *fairly* well targetted and a good enough source of things like pizza coupons.

If spam was targetted to me and *clearly* marked so it didn't interfere with my regular emailling, and allowed me to easily unsubscribe - i dont think i'd mind too much.

I have no need for penis enlargement pills, but don't objected to what are technically unsolicited adverts from my local computer store. Even if I wanted to take advantage of 90% of spam I couldn't because i dont live in the US.... that's just wasteful.

What about the FBI or IRS?

Okay, this may be a silly question, and one that has been asked many times before, but I haven't seen it here.

In every interview with Ralsky that I've read, I've seen him mention that he had to use open proxies, open relays, etc, etc. He doesn't seem to ever admit to having any systems that do the actual mail sending, instead he has always stated that he hijacks other systems to send out his garbage. There are many computer tresspass laws on the books here in the US already, and Ralsky is in the US. With his public statements, why hasn't the FBI picked him up for computer tresspassing charges?

With all he has done, it would not surprise me in the least if the examination of his computer network revealed the source for at least a few of the worms/viruses used to turn an Outlook Express user's computer into a spam sending drone. Again, there are laws on the books already that cover these sorts of illegal activities in the US.

Another thought that popped into my head, is why the IRS hasn't come after him for tax evasion? With all of his wealth, and his admitted morals, you know he hasn't claimed all of his income on his 1040's. A nice tax audit in the face of an FBI investigation would likely reveal all of those companies that are paying him to break the law and send their garbage out through these (essentially) hacked systems. They could also be brought up on charges as accomplices in any computer tresspass actions.

I guess the biggest problem is that there would need to be damages shown. Well, having run a regional ISP's mail servers for the last 10 years I can tell you, there are a lot of damages to be accounted for that are the direct cause of spam. The countless hours writing and implementing anti-spam filters, the angry customer phone calls, and all of the emails we get accusing us of selling our customer lists to spammers, etc. Not to mention the lost revenue from people switching providers because they were getting too much spam. The damages to our company over the last few years alone amounts to tens of thousands of dollars if not more. The AOL's, Verizon Online's, etc. have lost a lot more.

Its next to impossible to quantify in exact dollar amounts though. The process goes like this, "our mail servers need to be upgraded because the volume of mail is higher". Can it be attributed directly to spam, or to a growing customer base? Things may get easier after January 1st for us, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.

So if anyone out there sees this, and has a cousin or friend that works for the FBI or the IRS, you may want to turn them on to Ralsky and crew. Make him an example and others may (but probably won't) be deterred from entering the same line of (ahem) "work".

Victim?

He makes it sound like he's the victim because people block his emails.

Maybe he should figure out that those are not his networks he is sending the emails over.

And the "if you don't like it unsubscribe..." bit is funny. How about, if I want it I'll subscribe?

Tom

You guys make spam too complicated....

I do not have a spam problem.

1. Buy yourself a domain and setup a default alias that you check...
2. For each website you goto that needs an email, give them their own.

yahoo.com gets [e-mail]
cheaptickets.com gets [e-mail]
monkeysex.com gets [e-mail]


and so on. If one happens to sell/use your address, big deal, /dev/null that sucker. Keep one address just for friends and compadres and you'll never have a spam problem..You'll also know who you can't trust cause it shows up right in the To: line....Sure, one or two might show up once in a while because they guessed it but I have had the same address for almost a year now and I get 0 in my inbox while my Spam box gets /dev/nulled with the full confidence of nothing getting lost.

Re:easy now killer

Unsolicited commercial messages are streamed at you constantly, billboards, tv, radio etc etc. ...To warrant JAIL TIME? Really now, I think this crowd needs a little perspective.

No, YOU need a little perspective.

Personally, I get nearly 200 spam messages daily. I know people who get spam into the thousands. He is costing me, and my associates, a *LOT* of resources.

• Bandwidth -- That junk mail, more specifically all the images in the email, take bandwidth. About 20K per message. Multiply by trillions (quadrillions?) of spam each year. Multiply by the number of hops that messages must go through, from my ISP, through my shared T1 where I pay per megabyte. Hint -- It's a lot of wasted bandwidth.
• Direct Time & money -- Thanks to my business, I can't run a spam filter, for fear of it catching stupid people's email. I've tried it, but I just can't configure SA such that it blocks the spam and doesn't block the idiots who have open relay ports, speak in ALL CAPS, and include a few URLs in their messages. I spend probably a few hours each week on spam, which costs my company a lot of money. Repeat for millions of internet users. I've heard the cost here in the 13 or 14-figure dollars per year.
• Indirect money -- I think just about everybody has deleted a legitamate message when culling out the spam. How many important messages have been accidentally deleted? How much money has this cost? Nobody knows.

I have no problem with the ads you mentioned (billboards, TV, radio, junk mail, etc.) Why not? Because the person who sends it pays all the cost. The net cost of sending a trillion spam is nothing; it costs more to collect and maintain the list of names. The cost of putting up a billboard is several thousand bucks. The cost of a radio ad (locally, in a fairly popular show) was $15,000 for a series of 15-second spots, to run for two months. The cost of a TV ad is similarly priced, I'm sure. My company has sent out mass mailings to its customers, and and that also costs us thousands of dollars. I've seen checks cut to the post office for thousands of dollars in postage.

The difference is clear. Traditional ads cost the advertiser. The spammers cost society more money than the US national debt -- every year.

These people are essentially embezzeling money from every corporation and individual who has email. You don't think that deserves jail time?

Address and Phone Info!!!

This is an accurate address. After several phone calls to some friends at some utilities/services/creditors, I have confirmed it. :P When your a debt collector, you make enough contacts with other companies that all it takes is a few calls/e-mails and you can own someone. I have enough information on this upstanding citizen to BE him (don't ask for it, i'm not that stupid..i'm already walking a fine line). lol. I'm so paranoid about putting this on here, I used a friends ID to go into his credit card account where I work. But perhaps tomorrow I'll call Verizon and cancel his internet account...awww! :]

Looks like meat's back on them menu boys!!! (that is for the /.'er who referenced eating his flesh)

6747 Minnow Pond Rd
West Bloomfield, MI
48322

His home phone# is 248-926-0057
His work phone# is 248-926-0668

He also has two celluar phones which I traced back as AT&T Wireless numbers. Not sure if both still in service - give a call, don't forget to block your numbers!!!
248-766-5996
and
248-766-6362

Send SMS Here [mymmode.com]

I suggest we all gather our junk mail/coupons/fliers and start mailing it to his house, and all start making collect calls to his house/work and cell's. We pay for OUR internet access - and he uses our time/money/bandwidth without consent, its only fair that we return the favor.

If anyone has any viagra (I'm sure someone does) - pleaes mail him some - with a lovely note attached on how to enlarge his penis. Maybe his boyfriend will thank you...

Cheers,
Anon

Who to blame?

He wouldn't have a job if companies wouldn't pay him for his services. I wouldn't download 300+ spam messages a day unless someone out there was clicking on them. All falls back on the un-educated computer user. I would imagine they would also have bad credit, problems keeping it up, and an overwhelming curiosity to see a naked Paris Hilton.

Don't throw me in the briar patch!

I think he's doing a PR spin. This law is actually good news for spammers.

Spamers are misunderstood Ferengi

Mr. Ralsky is Ferengi and spam is dealt with under the Rules of Acquisition. When Ralsky receives the death penalty his remains will be sold...wait for it...in cans of spam

Misplaced admiration

During the past few weeks i've seen a reduction in the amount of garbage in my hotmail inbox, I thought Microsoft implemented a new spam filter - maybe not.

From the article:
But he has not sent a single message over the Internet in the last few weeks.

Maybe the reduction in spam was due to this guy taking a break.

-ted

Opt-Out one list and find yourself in another

I will never Opt-out a list because these scum^h^h^h businessmen will take you off their list and sell or trade your e-mail to other spammer. An e-mail of someone who opt-out's is valuable because it says

The e-mail adddress is valid

The message slipped thru the filters

And the e-mail owner reads their e-mail

him

Okay, I'm biased, but I can't wait until we see him in prison.

I'm also biased. I'd like to see him strung up by the balls and used as a pinata.

I guess that's why I'm not a Judge in a criminal court. Oh well. Might be fun though...

Not the worst, though he wants to be

>>Alan Ralsky, commonly known as the world's worst spammer.

Ralsky's not the world's worst. That dubious honor goes to Eddy Marin of Boca Raton FL, convicted coke dealer, and generally believed to be the main impetus behind the SLAPP suit against the "nanae nine." Google around for 'rokso marin'.

The reason for Ralsky's supposed contriteness in the NYT interview is not any sense of having seen the error of his ways; the reason he's running scared is the recent lawsuit against fellow spambag Scott Richter of Denver CO.

All three of them need to be dressed up in frilly lingerie and dropped into Bubba's cell along with a bucket of chilled champagne.

Criminal Charges?

By his own admission, he once produced more than 70 million messages a day from domains registered with fake names, largely by way of foreign countries--or sometimes even by way of hijacked computers ...

Does this make him liable for criminal charges if anyone can find one of those hijacked computers? IANAL, but even admitting to a crime without any evidence should still have a prosecutor sniffing around, shouldn't it?

Re:Criminal Charges?

Yes it does, but our boneheaded federal authorities are more interested in pursuing 13-year olds downloading Bon Jovi music.

A spammer's just desserts.

Alan Ralsky dies and re-incorporates in Hell. Startled, Ralsky asks "What am I doing here? I never killed or raped anybody." A bureaucratic looking demon in wireframe glasses sat him down at at a battered desk overflowing with paper and said "Look you're not here permanently. You just have to atone for your sins and you can go...well..to the other place."

"Oh! But what did I do?" asked Ralsky.

"You've sent a multitude of unwanted emails. You couldn't take no for an answer several billion times over. Look at this desk. Do you think that is all paperwork?" Ralsky pulled nervously at his collar as he noticed that some of the papers did indeed promise the demon a larger penis or fantastic real estate deals. "So what do I have to do?"

"Well", said the demon getting up from his chair and leading Ralsky out of the room. "You have clean up the spam." He led Ralsky to a vast warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with herbal viagra ads and other such 'valuable' offers. "How am I supposed to clean this up?!?!" fretted Ralsky.

The demon grinned maliciously as he wadded up a breast enlargement ad and said "Turn around and drop your pants."