The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

economist suntribune business saturday dec 7 2002 25 legal action an option from page 24 ways for spammers to gather their mail ing lists is to use search programs or spiders to search websites news groups and online guestbooks for email addresses once the spammers find these addresses mr redpath said they collect and sell them to each other until they have databases containing millions of addresses while the simplest way to foil the spammers may be a new email address mr redpath admits thats not always the most practical measure for businesspeople if you change your email address every time you get spam youre going to go through a lot of addresses he said and people who you want to contact you wont know which address to send to there are also several antispam soft ware packages on the market sport ing such names as mailmarshal mailwasher and spamcop they prom ise to stop spam in its tracks the problem with that is while it works for the vast majority of the spam it might also filter out some emails you want to get just because they match the pattern of spam emails mr redpath said adding he himself used a spam fil ter until if starting blocking legitimate messages from some of his clients legal action is also an option said mark davis a toronto lawyer with expe rience in the growing field of informa tion technology law while theres nothing on the books in canada that oudaws spam there are ways for businesses to recoup losses incurred by the actions of spam mail operators if you monopolize so much of somebodys computing power as to make the computer useless then youve interfered with their property rights he said adding there have been cases where internet service providers isps have sued spammers for tying up their networks these kinds of cases however usual ly involve isps as plaintiffs not individu als or businesses on the receiving end of the spam pipeline another problem with the lawsuit route is the notsoeasy matter of find ing the right person to sue since spam mers use a variety of ways to mask their true identities the bottom line mr redpath said is it will take some time for society to come up with a viable way to deal effectively with spam and the best we can do for now is to simply boycott any site or product promoted by spam jpm 111 e11 ww iwiran 003 3 available december 10th j k the gifts f that keep on giving jg dvd and vhs available at 5 walmart vj weseuforuss zh everyday v dnuxutn 2002 universal studios an rights reserved tm s c 2002 dreamworks llc an rights reserved barbie arc associated tfacrnarks are ov by and used un imvui 1skkess ostriixited exdusivcv by aniarra atlantis an rights reserved abianw atlantis and t fsct