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Four Internet firms launch legal assault against spammers

Setting aside their rivalries to fight unwanted e-mail choking cyberspace, leading Internet companies announced they had sued hundreds of people suspected of sending unsolicited junk messages known as spam.

The legal actions by Microsoft Corp, America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo, represent the first major industry actions under the US federal "can spam" legislation that went into effect Jan. 1. The suits, which are aimed at shutting down the spammers, were filed on Wednesday in federal courts in California, Georgia, Virginia and Washington state.

Dozens of those named were identified only as "John Doe" defendants accused of e-mailing unwanted pitches for prescription drugs, herbal potions and weight loss plans. Lawyers expressed confidence they can work through the courts, using subpoenas and other investigative tools, to identify and find them.

"We've been doing this a long time, and we know what we're doing. We're only a couple subpoenas away from standing at someone's door and handing them a summons," said Les Seagraves, the assistant general counsel at Earthlink, which named 75 "John Doe" defendants in its lawsuits.

The recording industry has been remarkably successful in identifying Internet users in copyright infringement lawsuits, in most cases tracing a subscriber's unique Internet address.

But spammers are famously skillful at covering their tracks, often routing unwanted e-mail through hacked or unprotected computers overseas and working under aliases and shell companies, complicating efforts to trace and identify them.

Yahoo, for example, employed as one of its lawyers in these cases Marc Zwillinger, a former computer-crimes expert at the US Justice Department who investigated the high-profile Internet attacks in February 2000 by a Canadian teenager known as "Mafia Boy."

"It is a significant challenge," acknowledged Robert Wientzen, chief executive at the Direct Marketing Association, who said he supports the latest lawsuits.

He said companies are increasingly successful tracing spammers.

"We're making some progress with techniques and tools that are starting to pay some dividends," Wientzen said.

The four companies said the defendants include some of America's most notorious large-scale spammers. They said they shared information, resources and investigative information to identify some of them.

The ``can spam'' legislation requires unsolicited e-mails to include a mechanism so recipients could indicate they did not want future mass mailings.
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