Man gets 9 years for spamming...

[tlhInganHom]

A man has been sentenced to nine years in jail by a Virginia judge for sending millions of junk emails, or "spamming".

Jeremy Jaynes, 30, is the first person in the US to get a prison term in a spam case. He is said to have been the world's eighth most prolific spammer.

By selling sham products and services advertised in his messages, he earned up to $750,000 (£398,000) per month.

Jaynes has appealed, and the court has put off the start of his prison term because the new law raises questions.

Under Virginia law, sending bulk email using fake addresses is a crime.

"It was not just sending bulk emails, he was falsifying the routing information, disguising the origin," said prosecutor Lisa Hicks Thomas.

"The end user couldn't say: don't send this to me," she added.

Ms Thomas said she was pleased with the ruling and hoped it would be upheld.

'Never again'

Jaynes was operating though an America Online (AOL) server in Loudoun County, where the world's largest Internet services provider is based, and is believed to have sent some 10m unwanted emails a day.

Products advertised in his emails included a "Fed-Ex refund processor" which he claimed would have allowed people to earn $75 an hour by working from home.

Jaynes, who is from North Carolina, will appeal on the grounds that he has been charged as an out-of-state resident under a Virginia law that has only just come into effect.

His sentence is the harshest punishment handed down so far for junk emailing in the US, and appears to be a strong signal that authorities will not tolerate the spamming business.

Jaynes has pledged that regardless of the final outcome of his trial, he will never again be involved in what he called the "email marketing business".

It is believed that 70% of all emails are spam.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4426949.stm

I don't know how I feel about this. I'm certainly not ardently against it, though.

And I love the irony that he was operating through an AOL server.

[KillerGodMan]

FINALLY, that *can't say in the forums* was stopped, about HALF of those daily spam messages were sent to me

[richardson]

This is why I love hotmail and yahoo.

ABSOLUTELY NO SPAM!

[tlhInganHom]

...My hotmail account gets spammed to death!

[KillerGodMan]

Originally Posted by richardson

This is why I love hotmail and yahoo.

ABSOLUTELY NO SPAM!

Both of mine get spammed to high heaven

[Marill]

LOL, you should of seen my yahoo account recently. About 70 emails in my inbox, all spam, and about 30 in my bulk mail folder.. and that was just after one day. I'm telling you, none were proper emails.

[tlhInganHom]

If you turn on the bulk filter in Yahoo! mail, it will catch pretty much ALL of the spam. If you turn on the junk mail filter on Hotmail, it does diddley and they try to sell you "advanced" spam protection.

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Or you could just not use Hotmail or Yahoo.

I have a number of email accounts with semi-obscure providers (although I don't think Gmail counts as obscure), and the only one I get any form of spam at is my University of Ottawa account, mostly because it's been whored out to other academic institutions.

[Celeste]

Gah, I don't know what you're talking about. Hotmail is the spam dump capital of the internet, and I had to switch email accounts cause the Yahoo spam was getting so bad! I actualy pay for my own email server now because of it. And I still get spam.

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by Sa'ar Chasm

...the only one I get any form of spam at is my University of Ottawa account, mostly because it's been whored out to other academic institutions.

The University of Ottawa: Canada's pimp.

(On a related note, I find it telling that when you search for "university ottawa" on Google, Carleton is the first result. U of O? Fourth.)

[tlhInganHom]

Odd, I honestly hardly get any spam on Yahoo! mail, and what I do get is filtered into my bulk folder. I suppose that may be because my Yahoo! email address sounds like a spammer address anyway, lol; "tlhinganhom@yahoo". It might also be because I religously tell Yahoo! when any spam gets through, so anything else coming from the same server or address will get filtered in the future. Either way, no idea.

Gmail also has an excellant spam filter.

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by tlhInganHom

I suppose that may be because my Yahoo! email address sounds like a spammer address anyway, lol; "tlhinganhom@yahoo".

True. I'd love to see StrongBad try to pronounce it.

[evay]

Originally Posted by tlhInganHom

I suppose that may be because my Yahoo! email address sounds like a spammer address anyway, lol; "tlhinganhom@yahoo".

Or at least it looks like you misspelled "tlhIngan Hol." Frankly, I think this guy's punishment should be to open, sort, and recycle bulk mail and to take calls from telemarketers for the next nine years.

[tlhInganHom]

Actually tlhInganHom means "little klingon". And, yeah, I kind of want to see Strong Bad try to pronounce it too. I bet he'd call me "thing-a-ma-bob", then "thingie-bob", and finally just "bob".

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by tlhInganHom

Odd, I honestly hardly get any spam on Yahoo! mail, and what I do get is filtered into my bulk folder.

[ ... ]

Gmail also has an excellant spam filter.

That it does.

Yahoo wasn't bad, though. My problem with them now is that since their big "upgrade" last year, I can hardly ever get in without it freezing up my (poor old) system.

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by tlhInganHom

Actually tlhInganHom means "little klingon".

Hmm. This could come in handy....

Job Interviewer: It says on your résumé that you speak six languages, Mr. Hayman.
Me: That's right. English, French, German, Latin, and classical Greek.
Job Interviewer: We do run into a lot of geeks here in the hi-tech industry, but I don't know that I'd call them classical... anyway, you only named five languages. What's the sixth one?
Me: Well, I know a little Klingon.
Job Interviewer: Really.
Me: I speak the literal truth.
Job Interviewer: All right. Say hello to me in Klingon.
(long pause)
Me: Um... I refuse. It is beneath my dignity as a warrior.
Job Interviewer: Get out of my office.

[Hotaru]

Originally Posted by Zeke

Job Interviewer: All right. Say hello to me in Klingon.
(long pause)
Me: Um... I refuse. It is beneath my dignity as a warrior.
Job Interviewer: Get out of my office.

Zeke, you should understand that most people don't know Klingon, so all you half to do is say a random word. Try to use H, K, T and G, they seem pretty common.

So Hello could be... H'ktg.

[tlhInganHom]

...Unless I'm the interviewer, in which case it would be a trick question.

P.S. There is no word for "hello" in Klingon, though they do have two similarly-used phrases. The most common is "nuqneH", which literally means, "What do you want?" The second is less common, as a Klingon will usually just state what he wants, rather than use formalities like greetings (hence, "What do you want?") The second is also as close to "hello" as you could probably get in Klingon. It is "qajatlh", which means, "I speak to you." Note that this is a statement -- almost a command in the first person; you're telling them what is going to happen.

I might say that I need a life if I weren't a Linguistics major

[Sa'ar Chasm]

I swear that language was born in a random-letter generator.

[NAHTMMM]

^Then you're a much more suspicious type than I am