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U.S. Spam Law to Take Effect Jan. 1
We lead with news that the U.S. 'anti'-spam law, written largely by the Direct Marketing Association, will enter into effect on January 1. The bill preempts existing state laws which are tougher (states' rights anyone?), so for many citizens, this is purely a pro-spam law. The FTC is thinking about bounty hunters to enforce the new law (which you can and probably should read for yourself).
The problem is that our current email system is flawed... one of the best solutions (or actually work-arounds) for the current protocol is obvious, and already being used by several major ISPs... opt-in for ALL email. I know a few people who do this (their server rejects email from all senders except those on an approved list) and it works very well for them, but the average Joe wants both convenience AND security for their email, so the hassle of having to "approve" folks is not worth it (apparently it's easier to weed the 30 or 40 legit emails out of the 100's of spam messages)
Face it, email, in its current incarnation, is inherently flawed. Until we actually change the way we implement and use email (perhaps even changing protocols) we will continue to have spam problems. Even Britain's "opt-in" version of anti-spam legislation has done little to curb the problem. The US "opt-out" version is even worse! When a prominent spammer is quoted as saying this 'anti'-spam legislation "makes my day", you KNOW it's a bad law!
I think that the problem needs to be tackled from a technical standpoint, rather than a legal one. If we were able to improve the system, legislation like this wouldn't be necessary!
Hm. Wonder if Boba Fett has an IMAP client in all that fancy armor... :)
-JT
Hell, I'll work as a bounty hunter for free, as long as I get to bash the spammer in the head... That's my "payment" for my "work".
The federal law is general - you can't escape it across the state borders?
The owls are not what they seem
It may go into effect on January 1, but expect spammers to treat it like April 1.
Yes, this is a great law. Even if spammers follow the law, you'd have to opt-out for every
"company" spams you.
That is going to work great. Put this one right up there with the Medicare Bill on the list of "2003 Who Cares If It Doesn't Work, We Passed It" legislation.
Its a step in the right direction, but isn't what you think it is.
Its a law that forces soliciters to acknowledge who they are (nothing really big), but the one kicker is to enforce that if you opt out, the spammer actually opts you out.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Isn't that the same organization that was formed by many spam companies to fight anti-spam companies by threatening to sue them?
Well that's just great! Have a spam organization set the rules for the country to follow by. It's official our government is forever currupted!
This space is not for rent.
Not far off topic (at least i hope) but what about companies that have a presense in other countries? like Sony? can Sony.jp spam you and get away with it?
obviously anyone can move their spaming practices off shore to where they don't care but what about those "legit" companies?
From the FTC article:
The bounty-hunter idea was promoted this year primarily by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., who called upon Congress to allow individuals who identify and help locate spammers to receive at least 20 percent of any fines collected.
I hereby stake my claim to the 20 percent bounty on one Flo Fox , of Slidell, LA. Hands off!Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Somebody please compress the text of law
i ca ATTHEFIRSTSESSIONBegunandheldattheCityofWashington onTuesday,theseventhdayofJanuary,twothousandandthr eeAnActToregulateinterstatecommercebyimposinglimit ationsandpenaltiesonthetransmissionofunsolicitedco mmercialelectronicmailviatheInternet.Beitenactedby theSenateandHouseofRepresentativesoftheUnitedState sofAmericainCongressassembled,SECTION1.SHORTTITLE. ThisActmaybecitedasthe`ControllingtheAssaultofNon- SolicitedPornographyandMarketi.....
It's not very efficient, but here goes:
OneHundredEighthCongressoftheUnitedStatesofAmer
(oh, like somebody ELSE wasn't going to do that?)
if this is it then look:
The bill will provide criminal penalties for violations of its provisions (up to five years behind bars), but will not allow private parties to sue spammers.
correct me if I'm wrong.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
I'm confused about how this will preempt state law. The state and federal government regularly disagree on a particular issue and have different laws in place to handle such issues (see state marijuana laws vs federal) but that has never preempted a state law or deemed a state law unenforceable. Unless of course a court determines the law is unconstitutional.
What gives?
I have to wonder if some spammers are already backing off in anticipation of this or if hotmail did something about spam. I went from about 200/day to about 4/day as of about 3 days ago. I thought my account was messed up and had to email myself to see if it was working.
Wouldn't it be great if that was a preview of things to come if this bill works? Yeah it's not exactly what we wanted but it does restrict them quite a bit and opens them up for legal repercussions for spam-blasting pron to teenagers. Things won't be as easy as harvesting addresses & blasting users with crap. I personally like it. If they don't have working unsubscribe mechanisms, forge headers, relay off of unsuspecting users, etc they can be prosecuted.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
This seems like another useless law around here. As others have pointed out, off-shore spam won't change a bit from this. Also, this won't affect the most annoying spam I get, the junk email from companies that I have an account with. No matter how many times I check my privacy preferences they send me email about how I can pay my bill online.
Technology could have solved this problem a better way. But leave it to the federal gov't to reign over another portion of our lives.
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
For those looking, the section on bounties is on page 19 of the pdf file: Improving Enforcement by Providing Rewards etc
It basically says that within 9 months of the enactment of the act, the commission is to set forth a system for rewarding those who supply information about violators; the first person who supplies the required information is to recieve a reward of not less than 20% of the total civil penalty collected.
I only scanned the file and I'm not sure how large the fines are expect to be; it does say that all property traceable to illegal spamming proceeds and all equipment used for such is forfiet.
Twenties Retirement
No Child Left Behind
Healthy Forests
Patriot Act
Doublethink doubleplusgood!
As long as the term dead or alive is included, I want in!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I would point out that anybody can write a bill. The real trick is getting it sponsored and buying enough votes for Congress to pass it.
(2) uses a protected computer to relay or retransmit multiple commercial electronic mail messages, with the intent to deceive or mislead recipients, or any Internet access service, as to the origin of such messages,
(3) materially falsifies header information in multiple commercial electronic mail messages and intentionally initiates the transmission of such messages,
It prohibits Fake headers and abusing relays and proxies. Granted, this will only start the use of throw away email addresses that are used once for sending the 20 billion pieces of spam.
People are complaining that it's pro-spam... I see that it is a start in the right direction. 99% of the spam I get is from outside the US anyways so I expect that it will not do much to change the amount of spam out there and in that note, if mister spammer moves his spamming operation outside the country then this law has no teeth.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
After the war on drugs, the wars on poverty, the war on terror... no the war on spam?
You cannot legislate away structural problems. Spam is the direct consequence of having an unprotected communications ecosystem. Communications represent a resource and spammers exploit weaknesses in protocols, interfaces, and operating systems to steal this resource from others.
This law will simply harden the existing bonds between spammers, criminals, and virus writers. Expect the fight to escalate, and your inbox to get fuller of junk.
Legislating against spammers will simply mean that spamming will become a criminal activity. Since some of the largest and most profitable and fastest growing businesses in the world are criminal (drugs, weapons, slavery, stolen antiques & art), what government can be so naive as to hope that this can succeed?
There is only one answer and I've bored Slashdotters with this often enough. Understand that the Internet acts like an organic ecosystem, where parasites evolve according to basic and unalterable rules that govern all ecosystems, natural or artificial. Understand that there are also ways to combat such parasites, based on variation, mutation, and recombination. Explore and develop these techniques.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
"It is hard to locate spammers, and it'd be very hard without subpoena power,".
And once you do find one (with or without the help of bounty hunters), what then? Im sure law enforcement will really care. Maybe the politicians will push for an example or two, but this will have no real impact.
Meet the new sig, same as the old sig
But most of us are just sick of getting 500 "PAR1S H1LTON S*X TAPE!!!!!" emails every day. And I'm particularly sick of the assholes forging my domain in headers, further flooding my inbox and prompting mailbombs and death threats from the aforementioned righteous and holy. If a measure bans domain forging and creates a national Do Not Spam list, I can more than live with the occasional opt-out mail from E-Bay. Sorry.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The problem with "opt-out" is two-fold:
If the law mandated that opt-out must be implemented by use of a web link (e.g. "This message was addressed to john.doe@mail.us, click the link below and you will be removed immediately"), that would be a little better. None of this detracts from the overriding issue, and that is by requiring opt-out instead of opt-in (either double opt-in or a verification link) this law essentialy legalizes, indeed encourages, spam.
How can anyone complain about and Anti-SPAM law?
How could anyone complain about my new (patented) Hugs And Kisses greeting? Of course, its actually punching you in the face and dropping a brick on your foot, buts its called "hugs and kisses", so how could anyone complain about that?
You can't take the sky from me...
Looks to me as the laws were conveniently rewritten (as the have been for the past many months) to make legit what would not have been easily defensible without the rewritten laws ....
Maybe the CAN-SPAM law is more commercial than political. But, I am starting to believe that most politics is now commercial ... Am I one of just a few sceptics ?
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
net connection to that Sarlacc. The three sarlaccs in my backyard are splitting a T3, but remember, connectivity is rather spotty on Tatooine ever since Jabba signed that deal with Covad.
Three things strike me about this law:
1. After reading the text, it does not include the word "bulk" in any context for spam, which basically means that any single person email to another person (even if sent in good faith) could be applicable to the law if the receiver deems it "spam." I think that is a mistake.
2. It limits statutory damages for civil violations. This is ridiculous, is it really necessary to protect the spammers, basically the most hated group of people within the net?.
3. It still allows "spam" email from charities, religious organisations and government bodies. Now all I need is my penis enlargement emails coming to me from the church of large testicles. Seriously though, why is junk mail from churches or the even the government for that matter better than my daily breast enlargement emails?
I see this as a dangerour move for the legislators who passed the bill. If they go about trumpeting it in their re-election campaign then it could backfire HARD.
Look, we all know that a bill on the books in even a country as influential as the US won't do any good for technical reasons.
If the senators talk about how they're doing it for the little guy and then said little guy looks in his inbox to find just as many, if not more, penis ads then confidence in the reps could waver.
Not only that, but I'll be that overseas spammers are smiling at this bill. Just because you clicked on an opt-out link in an email from a company based on China doesn't mean that they have to remove you from their list any more than they did before. In fact, now I'd bet that you're going to see even more spam because people in the US will be doing just that; clicking on all the opt-out links thinking that now they're protected by the new bill.
this should be fun to watch =]
Well, at least no spammer would ever ruin their great brand recognition and close down shop only to open up again under a new name every couple weeks...
You can't take the sky from me...
So for any spam that has a forged header or a misleading subject, California's new law, with the $1000 per spam penalty, will still apply. California allows private suits in small claims court by any party. So you can haul the bozos into court. Maybe even across state lines.
A year or two from now, we'll be rid of the chickenboners, but we'll be getting even more spam from "legitimate businesses".
The RIAA writes the copyright laws.
The Direct Marketing Association writes the SPAM laws.
The Rapists write the sex laws.
The Breweries write the alocohol laws.
Way to go legislators, leading the people into a safer future!
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
Here's my version: The Direct Marketing Association drafted an anti-spam law to protect US from THEM.
We're screwed.
"How do you expect me to see the forest with all these damn trees in the way?!"
Are there enough spammers in the United States to make it worth the bounty?
:)
Not for long -- anti-spam bounties will drive the remaining US spammers offshore.
Maybe we should just keep the vile stuff here at home. I think Lyndon Baines Johnson put it well when he said "Better to have the skunk inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in."
But seriously -- no US bounty is going to affect non-US spammers. And if the bounty does actually hit US spammers where they live, expect international spammers to pick up the slack.
"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
-kgj
-kgj
The weak Federal law was specifically advanced/signed to supercede and eliminate the tough state laws. The spam industry (and those who benefit from them) feared aggresive state level prosecutions (think what Eliot Spitzer could do to them). They got a "law" that says it is doing something, doesn't actually stop anything, and protects them from everyone who might try to stop them legally.
Actually, no, I wasn't going to do that... I was going to gzip it, then list the base-10 representation of the gzip.
#define DRM chmod 000
People complain about the bill because, due to the way it is written, it is likely to actually increase spam as people reply to spams believing they'll actually be removed.
:-p
And the parent is NOT flamebait
It's a valid question.
Twenties Retirement
In SOVIET RUSSIA (Score:1, Funny)
All your e-mail belong to government.
-----
Good God man! I pity the man who modded you as funny!
1. Use cliched Slashdot joke
2. Mess up formatting
3. ???
4. Profit!!
There are two ways to interpret your attempt. You could have been going for a Soviet Russia joke, which could have been better worded as "In SOVIET RUSSIA, spam law makes YOU!"
Or you could have been going for the all your base parody which could have been worded as "All your email are belong to U.S.!"
In either case, respectfully, YOU FAIL IT.
(Anyone with karma to burn want to count how many cliches I've used?)
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Email is a problem that transcends State's borders (It's an interstate problem, not an intrastate one)... hence, it's a federal issue and transcends State LAw.
No actually, they're not just a good idea, they're a GREAT idea.
Unlike criminal bounty hunters, there's no violence involved. It's all intellect to intellect. Who can study and understand the most about everything involved. (Which can be everything from OS's, to protocol stacks, to network topology, to application exploits, worms viruses, daemons, services, ect.)
But how are they going to determine bounties??? This is a tough question.
Will it be by volume (amount of spam sent)
Will it be by complexity? (How hard will it be to decipher what the spammer did?)
Will it be by difficulty? (How well did the suspect cover up their tracks?)
Or will it be by the amount of time unsolved?
I think all of the above would make a great basis to calculate a bounty. I also think an audit trail of some type has to be established with evidence gathering, because it's not too hard to point the finger at an innocent person.
So if you say it's ok to bounty hunt as long as you're white hacking in the "name of the law" how far will you be allowed to go with your evidence collecting before you've crossed the line into privacy invasion?
See, that's the real conundrum with bounty hunters on the net. It's not like the days of the old west when you could hang up a picture of a guy, point and say "That's the one!" With the net there are so many complex ways to frame a person that it's unpractical to give goverment, let alone private netizens the type of evidence collecting power they would need in order to procescute people.
So maybe it isn't such a great idea after all. Sounds more like someone trying to equate the net with some spaghetti western. What we need to do is replace the current mail system with something better (something discussed many times here)
I'm one of those people that wouldn't screw someone over for a buck. I'm in the minority.
Technology could have solved this problem a better way. But leave it to the federal gov't to reign over another portion of our lives.
BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT! I've been listening to this anti-government crap for the past 5+ years in the discussions of spam. If technology has had the ability to solve this problem, then just when the hell was it going to happen? Are you waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain with a stone tablet proclaiming that it's time for you to deploy your technological solution? Spam has been increasing at an alarming rate and, with the exception of a tiny percentage of technically savvy users, most people have no technical solution to the problem. This law doesn't prevent you from rolling out the technical solution that you've been witholding for the past few years. Go ahead. Let me know when you've gotten every ISP, business, and individual running a mail server to adopt your heretofore secret spam solution.
It's like suggesting that we abolish laws against rape by reasoning that technology can solve that problem using chastity belts, mace, pepper spray, stun guns, and whistles.
If something is unethical and harms innocent people, then it should be illegal. The problem with the federal law is that it doesn't do nearly enough. But I'd rather that they outlaw some spam than make it all legal. Having a legitimate return address to clog with complaints is worth something to me.
Do you want the US business reputation to sink to that of Nigeria?
/. much. With SCO, Microsoft, Halliburton and others the question should be, "Don't you wish the US business reputation could rise to the level of Nigeria?"
Uh...apparently you don't read
Then the issue will quickly go away.
If the spammer's customer's have to pay the USPS or some guv'mint agency a dollar per email they send out, and maybe a day in jail per million spam emails, its cheaper and smarter to use smail mail. And most of them won't anyway.
The best way to get rid of spamers is to squeeze their customers.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I believe you've confused "April 1st" with "December 25th".
CAUCE's response to the law can be read here.
A copy of the final version of the law can be found here.
According to CAUCE, the law was passed without any public hearings. What a shame.
I read over most of this law, and there doesn't seem to be anything unreasonable in it. Certainly nothing the DMA would want, does anyone have any proof of the claim that they drafted it?
What's really funny is that in that entire string of text, the work "Pornography" is the first word my brain grabbed focus on.
Since those addresses will all be in China, Korea, or South America, it will hardly matter.
Like spammers who are already committing wire fraud with ever run are going to care about a new law that won't be enforced.
Like the anti-spam packages currently use.
Use opt-in, and if you get a message from somebody that isn't on the list, it gets quarantined. Once a day (or however often) you get a digest that lists all the quarantined messages, their senders, the subjects. Next to each list item is a link that allows you to release/view the quarantined mail.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
It's funny, many of those authoring "cyber" legeslation, never seem to understand the scope or technology behind the problems they attempt to solve. For example, what stops me from setting up a machine in Ethiopia and sending my important msg about erectile dysfunction, and my new miracle cream to millions of US addresses? What stops me from plucking any number of wide open .hk hosts of the network and using them to send out my spam?
This "Anti-Spam" law is merely an attempt to appease he voting public, and show that our government is "doing something about the problem".
The best way to get rid of spam is to target the companies using it as a means of advertising.
Online money transactions have the longest paper trail and validation setup of any other consumer service online. If they're capable of receiving payments online, they're capable of being tracked down.
What if every /.er forwarded every piece of spam to their Senators and Reps before deleting it? Just make a group in your address book...
You will quit sending when they opt out - how many 'opt out' e-mails would you suppose they need to generate to shut off the Forward Spam Flood?
Just a thought.
Goals for 2011: 1. Stop plate tectonics. 2. Prevent animal predation. 3. End supernovae now. 4. Rid the world of evil.
The fix... OK.
:) (but not geeks, oh no!)
Being a product of my time, my proposal is simply a mix of what I already see and know. Presumably what will actually happen is going to be totally different.
But here goes anyhow:
- First, treat viruses and worms and trojans as natural phenomena rather than the consequence of directed human activity. Assume that there will always be a new, smarter, more capable virus able to get around whatever locks we put into place.
- Second, assume that all data passing into a computer system is suspect, and must be discarded unless it can be accepted. Apply this paranoia at all levels from individual packets up to the contents of web forms.
- Third, use the techniques of genetic programming to evolve filters that work at each of these levels. Allow them to evolve rules for identifying valid and invalid data, and run them on live data mirrored from many places on the Internet. Use honeypot systems to attract parasitical software, and integrity checks to see how well filters perform, and to cull those that do worst.
In the final goal, every computer has a slightly different set of filters, inherited from other computers, recombined and improved over time.
Not just more variation in the landscape, but total variation, to the point where viruses will have to actively work to crack each individual computer (for this is the logical next step: if defences are built using the techniques of evolution, so will the parasites).
Using a biological model lets me predict some more effects:
- filters that find ways to co-opt parasitical software into the defense system
- computers having sex
- plagues
Ceci n'est pas une signature
...it ought to be awfully easy to filter spam if it must contain some text (and a link?) about how to opt-out. As long as it's clear what is spam and what is not spam, then the probably is almost completely solved...
.to, DNS and hosting is in .ch, and NO info kicks back from SamSpade about who registered the domain (if anyone can dig up info on beam.to, I'd appreciate it).
Sure, that would be the solution...
if spammers gave a rat's ass about the law in the first place.
Spammers are liars. Spammers are thieves. Spammers are already violating the laws in over 27 US states, as well as several other countries. What makes you think that they're suddenly going to change their ways and abide by a law that's designed to be all but unenforceable (citizens can't sue, only ISPs or state AGs)?
Case in point: last week, I created a mail alias for my university account, and used it for an "unsubscribe" link in a spam that I received. (Also known as "opting out", even though that alias wasn't opted IN to anything in the first place.) Today, that alias got it's first spam.
I'm actually surprised that it took so long. The site spamvertized is in
Do you really think that a spammer like this is going to suddenly identify himself just because the US passed an anti-spam law?
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Why are they trying to go after the spammers and not the companies that have the products advertised by the spammers. Basically spam is just email advertisements. If a company uses that as a method then that company should be put out of business or fined heavily. As soon as the customers disappear then the spam will disappear.
I was glancing at the law and noticed the term Protected Computers, and noticed the definitition listed was an obscure law reference, so i followed it, and realized the truth of the matter. The term Protected Computer refers to Financial Institution or Government Computers. Aint that cute? They protect themselves, but leave the citizens vulnerable as hell. The definition can be found here. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html It's about 3/4 of the way down the page.
I'd love to be contacted by strangers, depending on the distributed reputation of the person or machine contacting me.
If "James T. Kirk" sends me a message, and the fringes of my weighted Six Degrees of Separation net have never seen him before (newly generated cert for spam), or have seen him but say that he's a spammer (or maybe just an asshole in general), then I'll just ignore him.
If "Juicy Jane" sends me a message, and a few friends of friends trust her, even just a little bit, I'll give her the time of day.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Of course the law was written by, for and of the Direct Marketing Association. Karl Rove, President Bush Junior's boss at the White House, built his career on direct marketing (junk mail). That's where he developed his high respect for the American people.
--
make install -not war
I've always been leary about OPT-OUT options on shady spam emails. On more "legitimate" advertisement spams, like maybe concert updates from a venue I bought tickets from, there is always a tag-line at the bottom that gives instructions for how to be removed from the list. I trust this to a degree and believe that it will get my email taken off of the list.
:) ). Another thing I've always thought of is that if I send a message to be removed from their list then all I'm doing is confirming that my email address is valid and currently in use. Sure I may get removed from that one list, but now my email address has been confirmed as active and can be put on a whole crop of new spam lists. I don't have any proof that this is what happens, but in my paranoid mind it makes alot of sense.
When I get spam for "make your penis bigger and keep it up all weekend", I wouldn't trust any link they put in their email anyways. For one it could be a link to a site that might try to hijack my browser or do something else nasty (although that wouldn't happen because we all keep current on our patches and use less vulnerable browsers like Mozilla
Yes, that's why it's called the Can Spam Act. Perhaps someday it will be replaced with a Cannot Spam Act.
As the director of spamhaus said on british television when asked about how the new british anti spam laws would help, he said, "well, actually, it'll stop, let me see
His argument was correct: basically spam will stop being sent from within jurisdictions that have anti spam laws, so the spammers will move offshore. Then you then need an international agreement - how the hell are you going to enforce anti-spam against an smtp originator from china that uses a local relay, even the US defence department can't get it right (http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/inter
Have international IPR laws have completely eliminated fake goods ? No. Will international spam laws completely eliminate spam ? No.
There's no silver bullet. Stop your moaning to suggest that anything that's happening isn't a silver bullet.
As the economist pointed out, the real issue is economics. Fundamentally, it costs virtually nothing for a spammer to send so much spam. The only effective way to resolve the problem is to change the economics so that a spammer incurs some cost. When I say cost, I don't actually mean monetary cost. For example, the anti-spam systems that rely upon individual tokens replies institute a resource/time cost on the sender: this kind of works on a small scale.
I don't know what the proper solution is either; but it'll be a mix of (a) law, or psuedo-law (just like the laws we have with anti-invasitory direct marketing phone calls and junk mail), (b) technical measures.
It looks like the ball on (a) is rolling. Sounds like the technical community needs to put some work into (b) - spam catchers / filters / etc don't seem to be the real solution, something has to alter about the way we send and receive email itself.
People don't live that long anymore.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
No no no! You're only supposed to talk about states' rights when a Democrat is in office! Only traitors and terrorist-sympathizers would disagree.
[o]_O
Spam is normally untargetted, bulk email.
UCE, without the bulk modifier, is called doing business in the USA.
If I see a website that I want to do business with, I find the contact information and send an email. If you aren't careful in the law, my email can be construed as spam.
Targetted lead generation is part of how small businesses generate new business.
Under this law, AT&T's new subsidiary can email ANYONE, but my small business that competes with it cannot?
This isn't pro-spam, it's anti-small business, pro-big business regulations...
Ah, when the GOP's fascist wing (state and big business in combination) combines with the Democrat's communist anti-business wing, and they can wrap it all up in populist rhetoric.
A frustrated Republican,
Alex
i use hushmail, and it has a human authenticator system...
any user not on my allow list is sent an email to validate they are a person (it sends them to a link and they have to click on a moving icon in a picture)...
if they do this, their email automatically goes to my inbox, otherwise it gets grouped with the spam...
it actually works pretty well...
a system like this combined with an opt-in system would work pretty well, i think...
I really don't understand why so many individuals think this is a bad law.
I've looked the law over, and there are multiple requirements on each spam email message that will make it much easier and more reliable to filter it out as it arrives on your computer. Such as the requirement for a legitimate reply address in all spam and a physical address in a commercial spam.
If anybody should have a beef with this law, its the ISPs. They still have to carry the spam.
-Rick
I would define legitimate email as email from someone that has personal knowledge of you and wants to communicate something to you. In other words, you are not just a random address in a database. Could be a potential employer, an old friend, whatever, as long as they have a personal intent to contact you. Sure, this definition doesn't stop crackpots that are stalking movie stars, but it seems to cover most reasonable cases.
Devon
However that doesn't invalidate his point, which is that in some cases mail from `strangers' is legitimate, and you would be pissed if you missed it.
Some recent examples:
Obviously in all of these cases, there's some kind of previous association, but it's tenuous enough that any system requiring an opt-in from me is more than likely going to fail, and drop their email -- which would piss me off (and yes, it would piss me off more than spam, which I find mostly controllable via content filtering).
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I was wondering when Bebop would get into this. "Ed spammed him!!!" "Hey Spike! The next spammer is worth five hundred thousant woolongs!" Et cetera. Buying DVD sets will always pay off someday for in-jokes among small cliques!
Yup...
I no longer have my e-mail address posted on my web-site because I was getting so much spam. I use a PHP SMTP form instead which sends me e-mails from one of my accounts to another of my accounts which bypasses all filters except content. If they want me to e-mail them back they can include their e-mail address.
E-mail addresses change constantly anyway. Give people you don't know your domain and just have a web-form. If you want to e-mail them, add them to your white-list. It's easier to remember a domain name than an e-mail address anyway.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Actually, don't bother, I can tell that your definition would almost certainly suck.
I don't know about his definition of it, but mine is pretty good. I've gotten my last three jobs because of email from people I didn't know. Former co-workers had referred me...co-workers whose current addresses I don't know. If email were opt-in, I'd probably still be fixing printers for $8 an hour.
And let's not forget this one: you email help@somecompany.com and get a personal response from JoeTheThirdLevelTech@somecompany.com. Guess what? Your email server bounces it. No help for you, opt-in boy!
Webslum, and hundreds of other businesses, rely on email as its sole infallible point of contact between customers, potential customers, and the supply chain. There's no way we'd survive opt-in only. We'd have to use a new method of contact that was wide open, like IM...and then the spammers would just use that!
And lastly: your girlfriend visits her uncle's house, and can't get her email working. She misses you, and sends a message from his account. You don't respond, so she sends another. Now she's pissed. Your smug opt-in ass has no way to reach her.
Opt-in only is the most retarded idea I've ever heard for the problem of spam aside from the email tax (buhahahahaha). It's throwing out the baby, the bathwater, and a whole bunch of other shit to solve a comparably minor problem.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
And glassware and other "drug paraphenalia" is a multibillion dollar industry. Your point?
And the thought of lost tax revenue certainly doesn't stop the government letting corporations dodge taxes...