Skyscript Astrology Forum

Oh - and that mailwash program is pretty good!

Deb,

That is something new. In most instances Virginia, or any other state, can only pass laws regarding activites that occur within Virginia's borders. Therefore, if criminal activity occurs in Virginia but is orchestrated somehow in North Carolina, it comes under Federal (national) jurisdiction. Because AOL and another major ISP are located in Virginia they are the virtual hub of the internet worldwide. Virginia handles more internet traffic than any other place on earth so this affects them enormously and they want to maintain the ISP business.

Should our spammers have sufficient resources, this will surely end up on appeal in the Federal courts on the grounds that The US Constitution does not permit one state to pass laws regarding activity in another. Courts have a political ear, too, and the anger against spammers will certainly get the attention of the judges.

Can you imagine trying to seat an entire jury of people who have never been spammed? Good luck. I don't like this guy's chances.

Tom

With regard to both spam and unwanted junk mail/phone calls, the ultimate answer is not to give out your home phone number or email address.
If you have to give your email address out to anyone you don't know, or put it into a web page, then use a throwaway Hotmail or Yahoo address. (Although that isn't the complete answer to keeping your address from spammers - they now have software that can generate random email addresses by the million and, statistically, one of them will probably match yours.)
If you fill in those consumer-type forms with your name, address and so on, don't put your telephone umber and remember to tick the little box that says "Tick here if you do not wish to receive offers from other companies".

With regard to astrological indicators, I personally think that the Neptune-Uranus conjunction in Capricorn has a lot to answer for!

This reply is coming in a bit late on this thread, but wanted to point out a few things related to spam.

1. It's not going away. Regardless of what the US proposes as legal measures against it. Spamers can just set up a server and "office" off-shore or in some other area of the globe that is out of US jurisdiction.

2. As a previous poster noted, the only remedy is to NOT give out one's email address and do NOT have email address displayed anywhere online, where spiders and robot slurp them up.

3. I highly recommend http://www.mailinator.com -- a free service that creates a vaporous email acct that you dispose of as soon as you're done with it. Visit their site for all the details. I use them all the time and they're fabulous. Again, it's free.

Frederick