KEY POINTS:
Even the most liberal among us might find the phrase "hanging's too good for them" leaping to our lips when we read about the case of the Christchurch-based spammers. Roland Smits and brothers Shane and Lance Atkinson have been given 30 days to file a statement of defence before a judge decides on whether to impose fines of $200,000 on the trio.
The men sent more than two million emails to New Zealand addresses in 2007, though presumably they spammed a lot of people overseas too, since they made $3.3 million for their "work", which would have meant $1.65 a delivery if it had been only local.
Nice work if you can get it? Not really. Even the most intermittent web user detests spammers as something akin to pond scum, not least because they seem to have such a low opinion of their target market: they assume, for example, that all of us - including women - are deeply disaffected with the size of our penises and will happily drop what we are doing so we can sign up for a herbal enlargement programme run by con artists in Mauritius.
Regrettably the court will have to apply the law, but if ever there was a case in which the punishment should fit the crime, this is it.
Let the young men keep their $200,000. Let them handwrite (no photocopies, please) apologies to every household - wired or not, just to be sure - in the country.
And let them deliver them. By hand. On foot.
