Texas Sues Spam Operation

The state of Texas has sues a major spam operation for sending messages against the law.

According to Greg Abbot, the charges were filed against Ryan Pitylak, a student at the University of Texas and Mark Trotter from California.

They apparently have been running the online entities PayPerAction and Leadplex. These sites have been accused of sending millions of spam messages.

The defendants claim that their businesses are legitimate, and that they comply with the CAN-SPAM law. The CAN-SPAM legislation was enacted last year to help kill spam.

The defendants are specifically accused of using inaccuracies in the subjects and bodies of their e-mail messages. The CAN-SPAM legislation specifically holds subject line content to certain standards.

Abbot also says that the pair violated Texas anti-spam laws in their mass e-mailings. He also mentioned that Microsoft cooperated by setting up "spam traps" to help the state to bring charges.

Spam Traps typically are web pages full of bogus email addresses designed for spammers to harvest. When a message is sent to one of the addresses - it can safely be assumed that it's from a spammer.

The data collected by Spam Traps is sometimes used to generate blacklists of known spammers to be used by spambusters.

SpamButcher's trial version is available as a spam blocker download. Its trial version lasts for 21-days before requiring registration.

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