Ralsky swears he’s going straight

There’s a story in today’s NYT in which Adam Ralsky, one of the US’s most notorious spammers, says the new anti-spam law has forced him to rethink his business plans. According to the article, “He stopped sending e-mail offers for everything from debt repayment schemes to time-share vacations even before President Bush, on Dec. 16, signed the new Can Spam Act, a law meant to crack down on marketers like Mr. Ralsky.

He plans to resume in January, he said, after he overcomes some computer problems, and only after he changes his practices to include in his messages a return address and other information required by the law, the title of which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing.

That is quite a switch for Mr. Ralsky, who has earned a reputation as a master of cyberdisguise. By his own admission, he once produced more than 70 million messages a day from domains registered with fake names, largely by way of foreign countries – or sometimes even by way of hijacked computers – so that the recipients could not trace the mail back to him….”