George W. Bush signed legislation on Tuesday setting fines and prison terms for peddlers who use spam, after Jan. 1, 2004, to sell porn, cheap loans and virility pills. In June, Microsoft moved to curtail unsolicited e-mail by launching 15 lawsuits in the United States and Britain against companies that sent more than two billion spam messages to its customers.
A Canadian company has been caught up in a crackdown on some of the world's largest junk e-mail distributors launched in the United States yesterday by the New York State Attorney-General and Microsoft Corp.
Teslianet Inc., a Toronto-based business, is one of a number of defendants named in a US$18.8-million civil lawsuit filed by Microsoft after a six-month investigation with the New York Attorney-General's office.
Teslianet is "allegedly responsible for millions of illegal spam messages that advertised potentially offensive adult content," according to Microsoft, the world's largest software company and provider of the MSN Hotmail e-mail service.
