Legal Help, What are the legalities on this software?

[bosch]

This is a legal/opinion question for the board, I have a group of friends that own a small software firm, they don't work in adult and they don't have a good grasp on alot of the recent laws or happenings. They've developed things like ad serving software and mail servers in the past and sold them to mainstream buyers and have done pretty well for themselves.

Recently however, their newest project sort of scared me a little bit, and I've been trying to convince them that it's not exactly the best idea from a legal standpoint but they seem to think it's perfectly legal and that there aren't any laws against it. I honestly don't know for sure whether it's 'technically' legal or not legal but the general idea of it seems to be very shady at the least. They work so far into the "mainstream" arena that they're a little blind into how the software will be looked at by other people, they look at it as a "mainstream" mailing application, whereas I've been explaining to them that it'll only be of use to spammers. They actually want to get the users permission to send emails from their computer, sort of SETI@Home style, which is a bit hilarious.

Here's the software:
They wrote a client and server side application, the client side gets installed by a user on his or her "home" computer, then every so often during the day the software checks in with the server and pulls down a set number of emails from different email "lists" housed on the main server. It also pulls down the body of the messages to be sent, the software is also it's own mailing server and then sends out the messages to the different emails, then communicates back to the main server letting it know the status of what it has done. Now their software is setup to manage thousands and thousands of clients, and their idea is that they would be able to send out their large mailings without using any processing power or resources and also without being blocked by different ISP's etc. Each client can send no more than 100 messages per day but with thousands and thousands of clients the network would be capable of sending millions of emails.

I of course pointed out that this puts the user running their client app in danger because it's the user's IP address that shows up on the headers of the emails.

Basically I'm just looking for some sort of proof, that using a user's computer to send mailings/spam is illegal, even with the users consent, their argument is that they are merely acting as a service provider and that the people paying them to send mailings will be responsible for whether the emails are legit or spam and the content of the actual emails and not them. I argue that they will be in trouble simply for providing a network for spammers of sorts to be sending spam.

I personally don't send or advocate spam and I don't do mailings or anything of the sort, nor can I put you in touch with them or sell you the software so please dont ask, this is strictly about how legal or not legal this is.

Thanks...

[SpaceAce]

Distributed spam. That's just fantastic. Your friend is an asshole and he'll end up in jail and up to his eyeballs in judgements.

SpaceAce

[FATPad]

Your friend is a retard.

[ThePornPusher]

Its considered a backdoor. Not only that, but it sends out spam mail, so thats another law breaker. What is there not to get about how legal this is?