Why Isn't SPAM Regulated Like Fax?

byronne asks: "It seems like spam has escalated so much lately that it seems to actually become a quantifiable bandwidth waster. The less bandwidth available, the less productivity due to spam-dedicated bandwidth is lost. Being primarily a phone system transmitted medium, why can't unsolicited junk email be regulated and controlled like junk fax? Just a simple question that I haven't seen anybody ask or relate together." SPAM is becoming more and more of a problem with today's e-mail. I used to find e-mail a valuable tool for communication, but even with filters, folders and SPAM software, I spend more time culling my inbox than I do reading mail (and if I see one more mail with "allhallowmas" in the title, I'm going to go postal!). Is regulation the answer? Many people fear such a move, but might it be time to give it some serious thought?

Comments

Fax Regulation vs Spam Regulation

[fwc]

Let me preface this with I think we need to do *something* about the spam problem, so the first part of this is *not* saying we shouldn't regulate Spam.

The reason that junk Faxes are against the law is because of the problems people were having with coming to work and finding a $50 roll of thermal fax paper spewed from their fax machines covered with nothing but essentially the content of most spam we're seeing today. This is a very real cost that you can put a figure on, and very definately was more expensive for the recipient to deal with. I remember hearing some stories of fax machines being tied up for hours with junk faxes.

The problem with spam is that it is hard to put a measurable cost on it, at least for the couple that the average joe gets a day. Plus, regulation in the US will just move the problem overseas in a lot of cases.

That said, I'm convinced that there is a very real cost to spam. I run spamassassin and literally get 200-300 spam messages in my spam folder every day, plus another 20-30 or so which spamassassin didn't catch. Conversely, I get about 20 legitimate emails a day.

On the mail server for the ISP I am the sysadmin for, spamassassin tags 75% of the messages we recieve as spam. We just spent $4000 buying hardware for our new mail server. If we had 25% of the load, we could have probably gotten away with a $1000 mail server instead.

Not to mention the times that a spammer decides to dump 10,000 messages on us within a 1/2 hour taking our mail server down to a crawl.

I'm hard pressed to come up with a workable, implementable solution which has any chance of working long term. Legislation has its problems. Technical solutions are a loosing battle on the filtering front. Economic solutions with advocate micropayments or similar (hashcash, etc) need to reach some sort of critical mass before they will help - but noone wants to implement them until they will. And so on.

There *has* to be a solution to this problem out there that someone hasn't come up with yet (or at least hasn't publicised properly).

Re:Fax regulation?

[eMilkshake]

From http://www.markwelch.com/faxlaw.htm (referencing 47USC227):
Under United States law, it is unlawful "to use any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement" to any "equipment which has the capacity (A) to transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper." The law allows individuals to sue the sender of such illegal "junk fax" or (arguably) "junk email" for $500 per copy. Most states will permit such actions to be filed in Small Claims Court.