>Bruce;
>
>I am truly enjoying the new laws that went into effect to prevent telemarketing calls and Spam. Yes sir! Marketing calls still occur and now come at 11PM from India! Also, I am getting Spam, which I did not receive previously to the new law going into effect in California. I think every one in Nigeria has sent me an e-mail! :)

Hmm...I haven't rcvd any marketing calls from anything but local police/fire charity in the past month, and only 1 or 2 of those, Tom. I thought (well, I mean I read this somewhere), that it was uneconomical to do telemarketing from outside US, even at possible very low rates in some countries, and even at special business/package deals. The percentage of "hits" is extremely small in cold-calls, hence the supposed uneconomic-ness of it. But, maybe not?

You're the first person I've heard of receiving overseas calls. Maybe you are on some sort of "guinea pig" list to test the overseas telemarketing cost/benefit? (Lucky you, if so, Tom.) Or has anyone else been receiving these?

As to spam increase post-DoNotCall, yes indeed, I agree. I noted about a 3-fold increase in spam very soon after DoNotCall went into effect for my primary personal account (now we know where the downsized telemarketers went). Thank goodness my ISP began major filtering within a week later (and I assume this was not mere coincidence). And yes, those darned Nigerians even get past my high-security, heavy-filtering, workplace email system. 1) They use only Plain Text, which attracts less attention, and 2), apparently they alter wording often enough to slip through auto-filters. These are normally the only spam we ever see at my work-place. However...

The worst spam I've had in the past month or two *was* at my workplace - from some woman in the Dept of Labor (my over-seeing federal dept.), and these emails we don't filter, just AV-scan, since all the addies are screened .GOV people, and totally traceable. But the woman somehow got hold of the "secret & invisible" all-DOL employee email addy - the one that normally only the Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao uses, and it reaches about 50,000 employees. The email was full of HTML & images, quite a large email, too. It advertized various Avon products, whoop-tee-doo.

It clogged up all the mail servers a) first a little, all by itself, and then much worse, b) a whole bunch of idiots hit Reply All saying they didn't want this kind of crap sent to them. (One of them was even a top manager at my own agency, I regret to say). But, this made for an interesting day for IT staff.

As to the woman's fate (she did not disguise herself at all in the email, she couldn't even if she wanted to), we're still trying to find out. Fired, or just a severe reprimand? We're still waiting on this finality. I'd probably go with just the reprimand, as the woman apparently thought it was okay to do the spamming...and we can't find a written rule against it anywhere (but there will be one in place very shortly!).