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UK And EU May Make Unsolicited Email Illegal
An anonymous reader writes "According to this BBC article the UK and the EU are planning to making unsolicited email simply illegal. This doesn't do anything for prevention practically, but it does legally pave the way for measures that do. Lord Sainsbury of Turville admits it will do nothing to stop spam from outside the EU."
I wonder where they'll draw the line of `unsolicited email'. Which mails fall under this category ? For mails like `RRApply for a online mortgage loan 247', it is clear, but if I send a mail to somebody, and this person doesn't like me, can he accuse me for sending unsolicited email ?
Though the article implies that this would be directed towards commercial email, it doesn't seem to explicitly say so.
:-P )
"Unsolicited email" could include personal and noncommercial messages.
Perhaps "Unsolicited Commercial Email", or even "Unsolicited Mass Email" should be addressed.
It'd be nice if the text of the proposed legislation were linked to somewhere. (This is your invitation, Gentle Reader, to post any such links of which you may have knowledge...
What exactly is unsolicited email?
Yes i know spam but what is their definition, i dont want to get sued for sending someone an email they didnt ask for
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How come countries don't have nuclear bomb testing anymore? Because it affects the entire world.
Why don't all the countries come together to eliminate spam like they did with nuclear bombs? The internet is worldwide and it affects us all.
We don't need an ICANN. We don't need a single police force. We just need the countries to come together and recognize that EVERYONE is involved and EVERYONE should do their part.
I heard some of the debate in Parliament on Radio 4 last night (I think, I was sleepy). I recall hearing an MP (member of parliament) suggesting in all seriousness that since faxes are supposed to have a reply address, requiring this for email would help matters. His heart is in the right place, no complaints there, but it shows how worryigly easy it is to pass inappropriate technology legislation if the legislators aren't clued up to understand the subtleties.
Huh, last I saw the US was trying to make sure that spamming is legal, at least for most organizations (politicians, non-profits which can do surveys "Do you prefer the crisp, cool taste of Coca Cola classic to the sewage taste of Pepsi?", etc), with laws written by the DMA.
:)
I could be wrong though.
In Denmark we have had a law against unsolicited commercial email for some time. The law was originally against fax spam, but has been extended to cover email too.
Maybe a new SMTP header can be required to contain the recipient's secret "Solicitor's ID". But then, some money-grubbing person could just delete or alter it and claim to the court that it was never there. I'm not an encryption expert, but there's got to be some way with hashes and PGP or something to prove this.
In the process, you'll first have to prove that the e-mail was actually sent from the sender it claims to be sent from so that you're accusing the right party and the sender can't deny it. Then you'll have to prove that the e-mail's data wasn't somehow altered in transit, whether maliciously or by transmission error, which could botch your methods of authentication.
Another issue is:
By what criteria is an e-mail solicited: sender, subject matter, or both? I might have solicited a receipt from Amazon when I made a purchase, but not Amazon's marketing for related products. I might like to solicit e-mail from anybody about low-priced flat panel monitors, but not any other kind of e-mail from the senders with this material.
And what about combined content? Some solicited, some not. What about domains collectively owned by a number of parties, one of which is on my white list? This thing is going to be a legal quagmire. This legislation is going to have to be thousands of pages long to explain how all of this is going to work.
One more thing... If they require some kind of encryption or special e-mail header, they'll have to make another law requiring all companies and developers who make software with e-mail functionality to change their programs to bundle or imbed whatever special code the government dictates.
in Poland it's already illegal.
You are describing good examples of why some people see anti-spam laws as potentially dangerous - and at least unworkable.
... and ... and ..."
The internet and email were originally designed to let anyone send a message to anyone - no ifs, ands or buts.
Now commercial interests have caused the legal machinery to cut away at this design.
They sell the laws as helping *you*, but it is really to reduce the burden of spam on large corporate and government networks.
In other words, corporations - through their appointed representatives (parliament) - are saying "yeah, we find the internet you guys designed to be very useful - except for this freedom to email thing, and this freedom to share files thing, and
Pretty soon it wont be the internet anymore.
So please dont fall for these ridiculous anti-spam legal measures that are not being made to help *you*.
Spam is a problem you can and should be able to deal with yourself - its an issue of code.
For more information, please see www.toad.com, cause John Gilmore has thought alot about this stuff and has an interesting pre-alpha personal anti-spam project in the works called grokmail.
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