I picked this one up on slashdot.  A woman in California sued a company called Kozmo.com in small claims court for sending commercial unsolicited email.  You can read her story, or view the entire slashdot thread.  Nobody got rich:  she was awarded $50 plus $27.50 in court costs.  With Kozmo gone the way of the dodo, it’s likely she’ll never see any of it.  She and the anti-spam crowd are calling it a moral victory.

Isn’t it funny that the most vocal spam busters are also the loudest voices screaming for anonymity protection?  It’s OK to clog message boards and email boxes with anonymous unsolicited crap, but any commercial exercise of that privilege should be against the law?  It sounds to me like these people want the right to say whatever their hearts desire with impunity, but don’t want the inconvenience of having to filter through other peoples’ garbage.  The California anti-spam laws apply specifically to unsolicited commercial emails, which I take to mean that it’s OK to send non-commercial spam.  So the anti-spammers’ real enemy is business, not spam?  I know that isn’t the case, but a superficial read of the situation could lead one to that conclusion.

Hormel, the maker of SPAM Luncheon Meat, has gotten into the act by publishing a note that doesn’t really endorse the use of the term “spam” to describe unsolicited commercial email, but does say:  “We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term.”

I agree that spam is a nuisance, and I’d sure like not having to worry about it.  In my case, email filters make it much less of a nuisance, and the few messages that get past my filters are easy enough to delete.  It’s certainly no more of a problem for me than the junk that the postman delivers every day.  But it’s apparently a huge problem on the Internet:  clogging mail servers and wasting bandwidth.  Legislation isn’t the way to combat it, though.  Getting governments involved will undoubtedly lead to more problems than solutions.

How to combat spam?  spam.abuse.net is the definitive anti-spam site.  Read and take action.  But please leave government out of it.

Reader Robert Esguerra sent me a note today about searching the faqs.org site using Google‘s advanced search.  Works like a charm.  He sent me a URL that will return all of the hits, not stopping at 100 like the faqs.org site search does.  I was able to refine the Google search to find just those RFCs that have “SMTP” in the title.  I’ve been using Google for well over a year and never played with the advanced search page.  It’s good stuff, and I’ll make good use of it in the future.

If you’re looking for Internet RFCs or standards documents, the best place I know of to find them is http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/.  They have almost every RFC dating back to 1969 (some were paper documents that apparently have been lost), and good information about the RFC process.  A separate Standards section indexes documents (mostly RFCs) that are the currently accepted Standards.  The site also includes FYI (For Your Information) and BCP (Best Current Practices) indexes that are invaluable if you’re trying to write something that conforms to current Standards and Practices.

There are some problems with the RFC process, though.  First, they’re still publishing using stone age tools.  I realize that ASCII text is “universal,” but it wouldn’t hurt to publish the documents in PDF or some other format that’s easier to print and to read.  Not many of us are still stuck with 80-column dot-matrix printers.  It’d be nice to have RFC documents that use real fonts and formatting.  Heck, a printer-friendly HTML format would be fantastic.

Another problem is that you can’t update an RFC.  Once it’s published, it’s set in stone.  The only way to “revise” it is to issue a new RFC that obsoletes the old one.  This is good and bad.  Good because there remains a history of changes so that we can go back and see where we’ve been.  Bad because it’s sometimes hard to find the most current RFC for any given topic.  I would think that it would be more effective to assign a single RFC number and then append revision numbers or dates.

The other problem with the site is that it’s not indexed very well.  Here again, full text search just doesn’t do it.  If you search for SMTP, you’ll get over 100 hits (the system stops when it exceeds 100) on pages that mention SMTP, but you’ll miss some of the important documents.  And although the individual document descriptions indicate whether they obsolete or are obsoleted by other documents, they don’t always mention other relevant RFCs.  The description for RFC821 (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), for example, does not mention RFC1869 (SMTP Service Extensions).

All that aside, the faqs.org site is still very useful.  If you know of a better RFC index, I’m very interested.

The New York Post ran an article yesterday describing how many radio stations have stopped webcasting because the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists is demanding additional commercial talent fees.  Stations that have stopped web streaming transmissions include all 1,170 Clear Channel stations.  Who is to blame is anybody’s guess.  The station owners are doubtless accusing the AFTRA for wanting more money for the same amount of work, and the AFTRA is accusing the station owners of not sharing profits.  This is starting to sound like the conflict between authors and publishers over Internet publishing rights.  My friend Jeff Duntemann wrote a very good piece about that in his web diary last month.

This isn’t the only problem faced by Internet radio broadcasts.  Most radio advertisement is local in nature, and advertisers (who ultimately pay for commercial radio broadcasts) aren’t willing to pay higher rates for advertisements that are broadcast to a wider audience (as required by most advertising contracts) if that audience isn’t interested in their products.  Discount Furniture in Atlanta probably doesn’t care that people in Seattle can hear their advertisements.