There is no internationally accepted protocol (of which I am aware) to deal with spammers, little or no enforcement by any government, sporadic enforcement by ISPs, all of which lead to an environment in which anybody can do anything they want. Spamcop is famous for blackholing people who later claim innocence, and for all I know these people have legitimate grievances. In that sense spamcop is extra-legal, so they're not exactly legit, but any attempt to quash them would be illegal AFAIK. I don't know how many spammers try to sue spamcop for damages, but in doing so they expose themselves to later enforcement in criminal cases. They also expose themselves to a civil proceeding in which the standards for proving they're spammers are not strict or even well-defined, and the concept of reasonable doubt is not important, meaning it's probably impossible to prove they're NOT spammers, since spamcop defines that, not them. So in Armor's case, if only one user in that block of IP addresses spammed (according to usenet or spamcop guidelines) within some given period, then the judge in a civil case would decide for spamcop, and might be required to forward all information to whatever D.A. handled that jurisdiction. Here is one tip to html coders doing ebots, to avoid being picked up on bayesian spam filters. Check out the scores you get for html in messages, for all caps, for images (bugs), for invalid return address, for dozens of other things. If you can keep all that crap out of your ebot, it's not gonna be picked up as spam in most cases, and will be passed thru to your users. I get stuff that's not spam, but is scored pretty high on Spam Assassin, due to stupid html coders at the other end, so I have to set my Spam Assassin higher than I'd like. Which is far easier than trying to pummel some bleeding-edge html coder into submission ;-)