Spammers Beware

U.S. Congress takes first steps against email spam

How to get rid of spam? Alas, the solution has yet to be found. If, until a few years ago, deleting a couple of emails was not a big deal, nowadays, when unwanted messages can number in the hundreds, it can be a real pain. Anyway, despite the best efforts of producing tools to combat this pest, we are still plagued. Currently available software cannot sanitize our inboxes, or at least not entirely on their own. Like it or not, lawmakers have to step in. South of the border something is stirring, and a few weeks ago the U.S. Congress took its first steps in this direction.
Someone called it a historic step, but at the very least the fact that the Parliament of the world's richest country has passed an anti-spam law is worth noticing. The House had passed the bill a short while ago, and the Senate discussed and passed it real fast.
The principles of the law, the Can-Spam Act of 2003, are few and clear, devised for regulating commercial email and punish severely violators of the rules.
The first point of the law is that every commercial proposal sent via email must include a fast and easy way for the user to stop receiving further email from the same sender (this is known as "opting out"). The sender should be easily recognizable and the subject of any commercial email shall include a tag clearly marking it as such.
This will be certainly complied with by direct marketing companies, although professional spammers will ignore it, as their purpose is to reach as many users as possible without accepting any responsibility about it.
It is quite curious, then, that heavy fines and even jail time are threatened for spammers sending out fraudulent email or even illegal unsolicited email. It's a well-known fact that many industrial spammers, sending out millions of messages, cannot be easily identified, or simply don't operate on U.S. soil. Anyway, people who flooded the Net with illicit messages and were so unlucky as to be caught could face fines between $2 and $6 million.
In other parts, the law orders the creation of a national "Do Not Spam" registry supported by the Federal Trade Commission. This would be an opt-out list where users could submit email addresses that must not be bombarded with commercial proposals. This idea closely resembles the similar "Do Not Call" list of phone numbers just established in the USA in order to curb telemarketing. The idea has met strong opposition for many reasons, e.g. security of the list, liability for companies emailing addresses just added to the list, cost of implementation, and so on.
Even though the promoters of the bill, such as Senator Charles Schumer, are aware that a law is not enough to stop spam, many people, including giants like America Online or Microsoft, say that this law will deal a blow to spammers. "With this law," explained Schumer, "Congress tells spammers that they could be jailed for that." "The scourge of spam has no single solution," he added, "but this law introduces a series of measures to allow people to regain control of their e-mailboxes."
However, the new law has many critics.
An utter dismissal came from Forbes.com, with an article titled "No Progress in Congress Against Spam." The article attacked the law, claiming that it offers foreign spammers an advantage: they can pass themselves off for Americans, forge emails with fake opt-out links, and thus harvest tons of valid U.S. email addresses, easily - and legally - spammable from abroad. The article closed urging Bush to veto the new law.

Publication Date: 2003-12-14
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3422