FTC Porn Spam Regulation Now in Effect

gManZboy writes "The AP (through Yahoo) is reporting that the FTC is now requiring that all sexually explicit spam carry the wholly original 'SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:' moniker in the subject line. I don't know why the porn industry is complaining about this, it seems like now everyone who really wants porn spam (not I!) can finally create a filter that delivers it to their inbox, highlighted, and bolded!" The FTC's regulation is available, and so is Slashdot's earlier story.

Comments

Great, but what about spam from outside?

[metlin]

Great idea, but what about spam originating from other countries?

First off, there is no assurance that spammers will adhere to this in the first place - if they are using trojan-ed systems and the like, there is no way you would be track them down.

Sure, some of them may, but if there is any way they can hide behind the anonymity mask, there is no reason they have to adhere to this.

Secondly, most of the spam I receive are not even from the US. Most of the stuff is from Asia or worse, eastern Europe. Do these regulations apply to them, too?

From the release (emphasis mine) --

The final rule follows the intention of the CAN-SPAM Act to protect email recipients from unwitting exposure to unwanted sexual images in spam, by requiring this mark to be included both in the subject line of any e-mail message that contains sexually oriented material, and in the electronic equivalent of a "brown paper wrapper" in the body of the message.

What is _any_ really? Is there a way FTC can regulate spam from other countries, or is it just for intra-US spam? If it's just the latter, it isn't much use. On the other hand, if it's not, how on Earth are they going to enforce it?

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[stephenisu]

NEWS FLASH!! This just in..

Those "Untrackable" spammers are selling a product, a product via credit card. Don't think too hard on that one.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Robmonster]

This is the same counter given to every law that triesd to combat spam. They are always unenforcable.

I dont think there is ANYTHING that can be done by governments that will reduce spam levels. The spammers know its wrong, but they dont care.

If anything they will AVOID using these tags, a they know their emails will be filtered out if they include them. A spammer is after eyeballs on emails.

The real problem, as ever, are the people who BUY services from spammers. Cut off their income.

Same arguments for an unsolvable problem.

RM

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Robmonster]

....going into a bank account in a country that doesnt care about spammers and will not cooperate with foriegn nationals enquiries......

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[metlin]

Sure, but the point is most porn spam is asking you to visit site foo-bar or something like that. Or maybe buy a product from some place.

And anyway, the sites that the spammers link to can always plead ignorance. *shrug*

Hey, I asked these spammers to help me out, but they did not stick to the rules. Don't blame us.

And maybe this will see even spam being outsourced ;)

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Reziac]

Um... if "ANY email message that contains sexually oriented material" requires this identifying subject, does that mean that if you want to talk dirty with your friends, you have to ID each message thusly, lest some unwitting soul intercept and view your pornographic conversation??

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Jason Hood]

Of course this cant be enforced globally. Maybe not even locally. But If I can set up a filter to send the crap directly to my Trash bin (Not a saved folder;)), even if only 33% of th emails got snagged that is a win in my book.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[stephenisu]

ok you guys win, the law with prolly be unenforcable, but it will be trackable. But about the pleading ignorance thing... try that in a criminal case and you don't usually get too far regardless of the crime.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[metlin]

But in a commercial setting things change. If I'm a company that makes Foo Bar, and if I say that I'd asked this marketing company to market Foo for me, and they broke the law, what can the judge do?

When you are just a manufacturer, and your distributors/marketers make a mistake, you cannot be held liable. Not unless they are all the same corporation.

If I hire a man to sell my product and he goes and rapes a girl (or a guy, depending upon his preference), I cannot be held responsible. Would a similar analogy not apply here?

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[mcc]

This is something I mostly bring up in the debate regarding general spam, but something that is very important to keep in mind is that if we can force spam to originate from outside of the United States, this is a major win. The fact is that every existing form of technical spam prevention-- blacklists, whitelists, graylists, filtering, etc-- are made noticeably easier if one can make assumptions geographically limiting the locations of spammers. Even if by "geographically limit" we just mean "outside the U.S.".

The thing is though I don't know how applicable my argument here is in this particular case, since as far as I'm aware (?) you don't filter porn spam any differently than the rest of it. However, spammers seem to be very loath to subscribe to any kind of law or decency if it means more work for them. Perhaps some spammers will get themselves screwed out of business because they don't follow this law and ISPs sue them.. a thinning of the herd, if you will.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[DrEldarion]

Bingo. Laws that try to regulate spam are doomed to fail. Spammers really just don't care! If they're out of the country, this doesn't apply to them. If they're in the country but are clever enough to not be traced, this doesn't apply to them.

What I'd like to see is legislation that says the company advertising in the spam has the responsibility of making sure the spammer adheres to the laws (sexual explicit tagging, do-not-email-me-again lists, etc). Naturally, you'd have to prove that the company actually hired the spammers, but I'm sure we'd see a dramatic cutback in spam if you could hold the company accountable.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[kunudo]

Instead of trying to track the spammer down by IP trace and whatnot, go after (try to buy?) the product that is being advertised, because someone at that end almost certainly has been in contact with the spammer. Subpoena their bank transactions, see who they paid that $2000 to for advertising services. Or even better if the spammer advertises his own stock of merchandise. Then you can just nail him directly... But I'm sure someone is going point out why thiu wouldn't work...

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Eventh]

The real problem, as ever, are the people who BUY services from spammers.

Those who buy services from spammers, are those fanatics who enjoy spam, and they would not filter out this. The people who tries to block out spam, would not buy anything anyway. So the spammer will not loose income by adding that line in the topic.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read this thread.

Slow Down Cowboy!

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment

Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[91degrees]

First off, there is no assurance that spammers will adhere to this in the first place - if they are using trojan-ed systems and the like, there is no way you would be track them down.

You can try. They'll have to accept credit cards, for example. You should be able to find who they are from that.

, or is it just for intra-US spam? If it's just the latter, it isn't much use

Yes it is. It reduces US based spam, thus leaving a simpler problem of dealing with foreign spam.

Why does everyone assume there's a silver bullet for spam? Deal with it piece by piece. If you can stop some of it, then it's woorth a try.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Jim_Maryland]

Scenario - SPAM company A follows the rules. SPAM company B does not. You, company P, aim to employ a SPAMMER to attract people to your website. Which company are you likely to hire knowing the the bulk of the population will filter out the content if sent by company A? As long as you have a way around the rule (likely a non-US SPAMMER or one in the US that ignores the "rule"), your not going to employ company A.

While you may drive some companies out of business, this will just make the ones who don't follow the rules richer or we'll see a shift of location from countries with the rules to countries without the rules.

Ultimately, I think that the solution has to look at those funding the SPAMMERs in the first place. SPAM is generally trying to get you to buy something so regulate where they can send their advertising budget.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[AnotherBlackHat]

Great idea, but what about ...

While I personally agree that it's probably not going to be effective, until they've tried it we can't be sure.

Once it's proven ineffective, then I'll start complaining that they've wasted my tax dollars and are interfering with things they should stay out of.

-- this is not a .sig

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[KnacTheMife]

"If I'm a company that makes Foo Bar, and if I say that I'd asked this marketing company to market Foo for me, and they broke the law, what can the judge do?"

This would be dependent on the judicial system, but it could be that it is the responsibility of your company to acquire some knowledge of who you are entering a business agreement with.

If the marketing company had a history of illegal and/or unethical conduct that could be shown in court to be relatively easy to uncover, and the conduct is related to the nature of your business agreement then you could considered culpable.

"If I hire a man to sell my product and he goes and rapes a girl (or a guy, depending upon his preference), I cannot be held responsible."

This could also depend on the situation. Off the top of my head example: You hired a guy as a door-to-door salesman for women's products. He rapes a women on his sales route. During the investigation it is discovered that he had prior convictions for rape that would have appeared during a routine background investigation. From this prosecutor determines that you're company either:

didn't do a background investigation -> low chance of being held culpable but still possible in a jury trial

or

did a background investigation but hired the guy for some reason -> higher chance of being held culpable even more likely in a jury trial

Also, in some countries, civil cases don't have the same requirements with regards to evidence as criminal courts.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[fanfriggintastic]

You COULD hold a manufacturer liable, if you could prove that they contacted the distributor in order to send spam. There'd be a paper trail that would lead right up the door step of that manufacturer. The rape scenario really isn't comparable... unless you contacted the rapist with the actual intention of having him go out and rape someone.... Damn, that's messed up.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello mastercard, freeze the flow of money to this credit card account.

Signed a judge.

the money has to leave the USA somehow, that means having, merchant accounts for credit card transactions, that also means doing business with Mastcard/Visa/etc.

so just because a firm is in a different country, that means exactly zip when going after them

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[themusicgod1]

There is no such thing is an unsolvable problem, in so far as you know something about it. If you know nothing about your problem, then you probably are in trouble, but we know a great deal about spam, who spams, why spam happens, where it comes from and so on.

For a start, how about, getting your government, in an attempt to slow the tide of spam, to help out the eastern european, or asian nations? To help them clean up corruption, and get a working socialist infractructure(ie, public schools, roads, healthcare ) so that people don't have to use spam as a means to get money, and furthermore encourage people not to be greedy scum(as opposed to the american culture of buy more! you need this this and that! you have to keep up with the Akkbars!). God only knows that the countries in eastern europe where this stuff is coming from need all the help they can get. Hell...help out the eastern european nations xor the asian nations and then use spam as a stick to hit the other with to offer them help.
Sure, this whole thing isn't soley about money and poor nations, but there's a strong correlation between poor nations without working government, and...spam. America counts. National ecconomics is at one root of this problem.

NOOoo let's...sue them! that's it... bastards can't afford to pay their bills so they sucker in some stupid white american scum into giving them their money. arrg

Seriously though:" Problems have solutions, you know?"

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I doubt they can do anything about those outside the USA, but there are plenty of folks in the USA for them to prosecute, and I certainly have no problem with them doing so.

The more spammers they prosecute (or persecute, for that matter), the better, IMHO.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think there is ANYTHING that can be done by governments that will reduce spam levels. The spammers know its wrong, but they dont care.
-----

Perhaps not, but the more spammers we can put in prison, the better, IMHO. And hopefully, all their computers will be considered "instrumentalities" of the crime, so the cops can seize them as evidence outright (and never give them back, since they were part of your criminal activity).

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[El Camino SS]

Sure, but the point is most porn spam is asking you to visit site foo-bar or something like that. Or maybe buy a product from some place.

And anyway, the sites that the spammers link to can always plead ignorance. *shrug*

Hey, I asked these spammers to help me out, but they did not stick to the rules. Don't blame us.



"I just hired the hitman to kill my wife for cash, I didn't do it. Don't blame me!"

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[M. Silver]

When you are just a manufacturer, and your distributors/marketers make a mistake, you cannot be held liable. Not unless they are all the same corporation.

I dunno about that. WalMart got held liable (unless it's been overturned on appeal and I didn't hear) for defective children's apparel when they couldn't produce the name of the manufacturer, who otherwise would have been liable. I don't see why you can't hold somebody responsible for the way they market your product. If you didn't get a complete rundown of how they were going to do it beforehand, that's your own fault.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[LuxFX]

Those "Untrackable" spammers are selling a product, a product via credit card. Don't think too hard on that one.

Yeah, but unfortunately the CAN-SPAM law only allows you to take action against the person/agency that sent the spam. It superceded better laws that let you take action against the company that hired the spammer. So it doesn't matter if you can 'track' down the product and the company/person selling the product -- as long as they hired an outside party to send the spam, they're free to do so again...and again...and again....

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Eviscero]

I question whether or not Spam is truely 'untraceable'. If the full wrath of the NSA was turned on spam, the spam-mails would probably cease relatively quickly. According to Spamhaus the United States is the top producer of spam closely followed by China and South Korea.

Now I understand that, in the US, we have laws that protect an individuals privacy; hence Federal laws that allow prosecution of 'illegal spammers'. With regards to other countries; why not have an unoffical government agency to hack the spammers? It's obvious that most foreign spam is sent with the intent of defrauding Americans. Couldn't that be construed as an act of cyber-war?

How about this idea? Have all U.S. ISPs block IP addresses from Asia, if only for a day. I wonder how much spam would get kicked back and crash Asian Networks.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[metlin]

I don't see why you can't hold somebody responsible for the way they market your product.

Because you know that immoral as their means of marketing are, they are quite effective (i.e. spam). You just turn a blind eye until the cops come calling.

At which point, what's to prevent you from saying we were not entirely aware that they were not abiding by the law?

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[metlin]

Have all U.S. ISPs block IP addresses from Asia, if only for a day. I wonder how much spam would get kicked back and crash Asian Networks.

Unfortunately, that would result in much higher losses in terms of lost business and revenue that it's simply not worth even trying.

Stock markets, businesses, international corporations and what not would simply go crazy if that were to happen.

Not to mention the fact that the rest of the world would not really appreciate it -- as if the US needed any more reasons for people to be pissed at them ;)

Ofcourse, the NSA could stop spam if they really wanted.

But the point is, they would not, unless they really need to. Maybe if the bad-guys started using spam as a means of communicating or something, they might just piss NSA off enough to do something.

Ah, dream on.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Gaijin42]

unless that bank is issueing their own credit cards, and you have that credit card in your pocket, it doesnt do them a whole lot of good.

Everyone accepts Visa and Mastercard. Eventually the buck stops there.

That lets through people who send cash, checks and money orders, or pay via their phone bill. I bet there aren't enough of those people to keep the porn and spammers alive.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[amuro98]

"US based spam"? Please define.

The majority of spam I see falls into one of these two categories:

* Spam originated from - or was relayed through - a country I do not want to receive email from (eg. China, Taiwan, Korea, etc.)

* Spam was relayed through a zombie'd PC on an American broadband ISP (eg. roadrunner, comcast), and advertises a website hosted in a spam-friendly country (Russia, Korea, China, ...) Said website is registered by someone NOT in the US.

Neither CAN-SPAM or this new joke of a law has had any effect on the level of spam I'm seeing or filtering. In fact, when CAN-SPAM went into effect, my spam load jumped over 50%. I'm filtering about 1000 spams a day.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Eviscero]

Then perhaps a pass-thru would enable legitimate traffic. Yet, crafty-spammers would just find a way to mask their traffic as legit.

Ah...dreaming....

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Romeozulu]

You're so right. The only legitimate email is sent from the US to the US. I mean, what use would anyone outside the US have for something as advanced as email.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[sjlutz]

I'm sorry mister Architect, I'm just the general contractor, I asked the concrete guys to help me out and pour the foundation. It's not my fault the building fell down, I didn't do the work.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[soft_guy]

Perfect. Now I can get revenge on businesses I hate.

Step 1: Find legitimate online ad for business.

Step 2: Rejigger ad into sexually explicit pr0n ad that links to their sales site.

Step 3:Send pr0n from ow3nD boxes running a trojan.

Step 4: Let justice be done!

OK, I wouldn't really do this, but someone else will which is why this law may not work.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[devilspgd]

The problem with tracing the money is that it makes joejobs extremely effective.

If I'm pissed of at ABC, all I have to do is hire a spammer to spam ABC's actual website and actual services, wait until I get the spam, then bitch to the FCC or FBI or whatever alphabetsoup is tracking tracing the spammer.

ABC has done nothing wrong, and obviously cannot prove a negative, they cannot prove that they didn't hire the spammer.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget the studies that show 90+% of these are just scams to validate email addresses.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Sylver Dragon]

"I just hired the hitman to kill my wife for cash, I didn't do it. Don't blame me!"

Different situation. In the case of hiring a hitman, you are knowingly solciting a crime, along with conspiracy to commit murder, and probably breaking a couple of other laws that I don't know. In the case of the company hiring a marketing firm to do email marketing, they may not have any reason to expect that the marketing will not be done in accordance with the law. Moreover, the action that they are soliciting, email marketing, is technically legal (remember, you CAN-SPAM). Unless they are specifically asking the marketing firm to circumvent this portion of the law, they are probably in the clear. Then again, IANAL (is anyone on /.?) so they there might be a way to twist this around and get a judgement.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[M. Silver]

Because you know that immoral as their means of marketing are, they are quite effective (i.e. spam). You just turn a blind eye until the cops come calling.

That's what I mean: that's not (or ought not be) an adequate excuse.

At which point, what's to prevent you from saying we were not entirely aware that they were not abiding by the law?

Nothing. But what's to say that's a legitimate excuse? They're acting as your authorized agent, so you're responsible for their actions. If you weren't diligent enough to pick someone who'd behave in a legal manner, you have to pay the price. And that durn well better be a higher price than the profits you made.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Sylver Dragon]

Maybe its just me, but I really don't mind spammers being pushed offshore. As it is, I alreay block certain ranges of IP address, what's one more forgien IP range to me, I don't get any email from outside the US anyway. The problem is, occasioanlly (and actually quite a bit recently) I will get spam from IP addresses that are almost certainly cracked boxes sitting on broadband. This leads to the problem that blocking the IP ranges that these emails are comming from would cut off a few of my friends, which I refuse to do. I have sent a few emails to Comcast's abuse email, but have not seen any response, and the problem seems to be getting worse. Personally, I wish other ISP's would start doing what my isp did and filter outgoing port 25 unless you specifically ask for it to be open. I can run my home mail server, and the idiots on DSL with an unprotected windows box don't send out spam. In all, a very good arangement, though the people at DSLExtreme seem to actually have a bit of a clue. As for the rest of the world, well, we'll just have to wait until they sort themselves out. Maybe if the US actually does something good (for a change) the rest of the world might follow, its that whole lead by example idea that the US abandonded shortly after it was formed.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Colazar]

Well, at least theoretically, ABC *could* try and track the spam back to its source, and find out who had hired the spammer in the first place.

Of course, you'd probably have to be a company the size of ABC to be able to afford to do that.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[glorf]

Actually most of the porn spam I have seen seems to be from "affiliates". Someone sets up a redirector page and fires up several windows and collects their penny or whatever referral fee from the sites that actually sell the product. So the company that sells the product has no idea and has not asked anyone to spam for them. All they know is they get tons of referrals from some site in the .to TLD.

I don't think it is the site itself sending the spam because using a redirector dilutes brand. And considering lots of those sites all buy their content from the same places, brand and URL recognizition are important. Without it the next time you go looking for your particular flavor of debauchery you may end up at a competitor's site.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[devilspgd]

Maybe, but realistically it would be a challenge if everything was conducted online through a series of 0wn'd proxied, and the actual payment (to the spammer) sent in the form of a postal money order.

I'm not sure about the US, but in Canada I can still get money orders, paid in cash, without showing ID.

Worse, once it happens once, this would become the automatic defense, and the "victim" would surely join OJ in finding the search for the real killer.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Sylver Dragon]

I don't think it needs to be that discrete. Find out who the company selling the product is, have some nice people with guns go by and ask them who they hired to spam for them, make sure you get some proof. Then, if the spammer is in the US, go kick in his door and drag him off to jail. If the spammer is outside the US, fine the company for conspiracy to commit a crime.
This should have two effects:
1) US based spammers who don't follow the rules get tossed in jail (or beaten with a cane, I like the idea of bringing back caning)
2) US based companies have a hige incentive to not hire non-US spammers who are not going to follow the rule. Brings money back to the US, and creates a method of enforcement that will affect spammers outside the US.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAL (is anyone on /.?)

Shouldn't that read:
IANAL (Doesn't everyone on /.?)

This is, after all, the hangout for linux fag0rz!

Score: -1, Troll

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Jedi Alec]

heh, not quite the same thing, since you're responsible for the end-product.

more like "how was i supposed to know that concrete was stolen?"

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[91degrees]

So.. because none of the US spammers have your email address, you assume that there are few or no US spammers?

The spamhaus spammer list would suggest that there are one or two US based spammers.

Neither CAN-SPAM or this new joke of a law has had any effect on the level of spam I'm seeing or filtering.

The Farm and Ranch Risk Management Act has no effect on me. I'm not going to argue that it was a bad idea because of this.

In fact, when CAN-SPAM went into effect, my spam load jumped over 50%. I'm filtering about 1000 spams a day.

Yes, but are you suggesting it was the cause? If so, you've just contradicted yourself.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[king-manic]

OK, I wouldn't really do this, but someone else will which is why this law may not work.

I'm sure if you send it from "toms hardware emporium" there won't be a conviction.

But if "Toms HARD cocks empornium" was your victim, then maybe. But how many people do you know who hold a vendetta against a porn company?

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[stephenisu]

That my friend is why there are subpeoneas :)

The company selling the product will have to turn in the spammer based on contractual documentations.

Then again the company could just pull the ol' Phoenix technique. Uh yeah, that company went under, as they are putting up the sign for the new company.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[antic]

Indeed, Slashdot has since posted an article suggesting that 71% of spam originates from hosts in China. So are these laws immediately ineffective against the vast majority of spammers?

Also, most of the spam caught by my quarantine folder is now regarding medical products. At least with porn spam you could check out the pic and move on. Spam about buying "meds" is boring AND useless.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[soft_guy]

What if I was pissed at a pharmacy and created a sexually explicit ad for viagra?

What if I owned a rival pr0n company?

What if I *was* pissed at a pr0n company? Or just randomly a jerk?

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[SphericalCrusher]

And besides, I think that people who actually WANT it, would enjoy this better, as they can create a folder where all of it goes to. Easy to sort through...

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[LuxFX]

The company selling the product will have to turn in the spammer based on contractual documentations.

Unfortunately the CAN-SPAM act also superceded better spam laws that let individual citizens go after the spammers (it has to be from a governing body or something, I'm not quite sure of the specifics), so while that would get rid of a spammer, nobody will get the satisfaction of personal vidication -- which would be the only benefit of getting rid of an individual spammer.

It won't help with the spam problem, because spammers are bottom feeders and as long as there are still suckers born every minute, there will be spammers born every hour on the hour.

Even though subpeonas make it easy enough to go after the spammers individually, the problem won't go away until the companies that hire the spammers are held responsible.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[H310iSe]

I posted this same question downthread as well... how do you prove your addresses are "solicited"? how do you deterime what is "sexually explicit"? I run a 5,500 member mailing list for local adult entertainment clubs, all our addresses are from people signing up for mailings at our website (we don't try to fake people into giving us thier email address), and since 2002 they're all confirmed with a second mailing to the sign-up address but a few years ago we just took people's word for it, we didn't confirm the email address they provided.

We always unsubscribed anyone who requested and have always used a legitmate, human-monitored "from" address. If someone signed up another person to our list 3 years ago, if that person never requested an unsubscribe but now decided that they've been receiving "unsolicted pornography" from us, am I going to jail?

I'm very serious, any info is apprecaited. I just know someone will do it, we get 10+ spam complaints a month, all from AOL members (using that "this is spam" button) and almost all are confirmed email addressess. These dumbasses are signing up to our list, confirming the sign up from their email address, then instead of unsubscribing they're reporting us as spammers to AOL. It's really, really silly, you think it's black and white but it's not and if these things aren't reasonably defined, well-meaning and, i think, innocent people like myself will get screwed and not a single real spammer will ever be touched.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside?

[Anarcho-Goth]

I think that sooner or later spam will be used more to sabotage companies, rather than companies believing the illusion that spam will benifit their own business.

Need we say it?

[bendelo]

Spammers lie, cheat and break the law. I can't see this being enforced succesfully.

Re:Need we say it?

[Cruciform]

Yes, but some of them are so stupid that they do it in a way that allows them to be tracked down and prosecuted. A family in Waterloo, Ontario got caught spamming recently.

Having laws on the books may not stop the ones who don't get caught, but the ones who do will, in all likelyhood, never do it again.

Re:Need we say it?

[Anne Thwacks]

Thats what cruise missiles are for.

Re:Need we say it?

[Remlik]

Amazingly enough I just checked my company spam box...In it are messages with the subject "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT" Some also have "-ADLT-" and some have "[Adult]" many more do not have any such lables. SO it would seem at least some spam companies are following these rules. I guess now it makes it easy to tell the "good" spammers from the "bad" spammers right?

heh

Re:Need we say it?

[IANAAC]

I've been getting some form of "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT" (hyphen, colon, space, etc.) for the last couple of weeks. But the ratio of clearly labeled porn and non clearly labeled is about 50/50 so I still have a lot that isn't automatically filtered.

Re:Need we say it?

[Shalda]

On the other hand, porn spam typically constitutes 40% of what hits my email address. Of 70 messages filtered so far today, I estimate around 28 of them were for pornography. About half of those were text only, and may or may not be subject to regulation (FTC site seems slashdotted). 2 were labled "Sexually Explicit". So I estimate an early compliance of about 14%. While far from perfect, even a little bit of compliance helps ease the burden and reduces false positives/negatives for me.

Re:Need we say it?

[gdbjr]

If they can't get spammers to stop sending spam, what makes them think they will put a 'SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:' moniker in the subject line? This makes no sense at all.

Re:Need we say it?

[MCraigW]

Apparently penis enlargement advertisements aren't considered "porn spam". I was looking at my filtered spam messages.

Re:Need we say it?

[Dimensio]

I guess now it makes it easy to tell the "good" spammers from the "bad" spammers right?

Good point. With this, we will be able to determine which spammers are to be slowly tortured to death and which should simply receive a bullet in the brain.

Re:Need we say it?

[Deliveranc3]

Once they do something illegal it's easy for the government to pay some money with a credit card and track down the funds.

So basically the questionable legality of this is what keeps the spammers safe, not anonymity.

Re:Need we say it?

[Bob Zer Fish]

and then take the money back out of the bank account when they get convicted!! :)

April Fool's Joke???

[Vexler]

First the "evil bit", and now the "pr0n bit"???

Re:April Fool's Joke???

[the MaD HuNGaRIaN]

And when you 'AND' the bits, you can check for "evil pr0n"!

Re:April Fool's Joke???

[thomasdelbert]

Yup. You click the pr0n bit to show the naughty bits in the dirty bits?

- Thomas;

The spammers aren't law abiding are they?

[margal]

Are those who spam really going to take note to this? Aren't they already breaking the law by sending unsolicited emails in the first place?

Re:The spammers aren't law abiding are they?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't they already breaking the law by sending unsolicited emails in the first place?

I doubt it. Someone please correct me if i'm wrong about the law.

At any rate, isn't unsolicited email just like unsolicited snail mail (atleast according to the law). I receive "You have been pre-approved for X credit card" letters practically everyday. I just put them in the trash like I do to my junk email.

Honestly I don't know how government can make this illegal to send unsolicited email. How on earth are they going to enforce it.

I say try a different, more technical approach instead of cluttering the damn law books with more unenforceable literature that everyone ignores anyway.

Re:The spammers aren't law abiding are they?

[Syncalot]

CAN Spam means people CAN send unsoliticed emails, provided the follow the rules outlined, and if its porn they have to follow the guidelines for sending this stuff, but the law allows people to spam hence the word "CAN"

My issues with this...

[garcia]

a) Putting SEXUALLY EXPLICIT in the title only makes it more annoying when you open your email. My gf uses AOL and her inbox is full of this shit daily. I would rather not see SEXUALLY EXPLICIT 100x over and over again as I scroll down the list.

b) Ok, so they force people to "scroll down" before seeing the image. What about people that have large monitors and email fullscreen? Do we have a set number of 100000000 lines before you see it? What about those of us that filter out white-space in emails so that we don't have to scroll through 100 pages of shit to get to the message?

c) How is this going to help the 99% of people that don't know how to filter their email anyway and are the ones that will likely end up with the gobs of spam in the first place?

Re:My issues with this...

[baywulf]

"Putting SEXUALLY EXPLICIT in the title only makes it more annoying when you open your email."

Assuming spammers do actually follow this requirement, you could simply set a filter to send those emails to the trash.

Re:My issues with this...

[garcia]

Assuming that I don't know enough about ending spam to my INBOX I doubt that I would know enough about filtering it once it got there (as I have already stated in my original post).

Re:My issues with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

"My gf uses AOL and her inbox is full of this shit daily."

You know, when she mentioned helping her with the spam problem, maybe you should have installed a filter rather than volunteering to do it yourself(!)?

You don't need to know a whole lot to filter your email these days...

Re:My issues with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, when she mentioned helping her with the spam problem, maybe you should have installed a filter rather than volunteering to do it yourself(!)?

You incorrectly assumed she asked me for help. She is so accustomed to it that she doesn't pay it any attention.

Re:My issues with this...

[JesseL]

a) Would you rather see 100 variations of "hot sluts that dig farm animals want to meet you tonight"?

b) So there are people who may see an explicit image before they scroll down, that goes now too. At least most people will benefit and none will suffer.

c) Similar to point b. If 99% of people can't figure out how to use the tools they've got, so what? Why not do somthing to help the other 1% of us anyway? The people who don't want porn spam will still figure out pretty quickly not to open massages titled "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT". Right now you can't tell anything from the subject line - porn spam comes with subject lines ranging from (no subject) to "Your Mother Called".

Re:My issues with this...

[Rick and Roll]

She is so accustomed to it that she doesn't pay it any attention.

Sounds like a buyer to me.

Re:My issues with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so they force people to "scroll down" before seeing the image. What about people that have large monitors and email fullscreen? Do we have a set number of 100000000 lines before you see it? What about those of us that filter out white-space in emails so that we don't have to scroll through 100 pages of shit to get to the message?

Really, I think whoever does anything like that has got several issues other than porn spam to worry about.

Re:My issues with this...

[The Locehiliosan]

My gf uses AOL and her inbox is full of this shit daily. I would rather not see SEXUALLY EXPLICIT 100x over and over again as I scroll down the list.

Why are you reading your girlfriend's email???

Re:My issues with this...

[DrEldarion]

Actually, this makes it far better than the old way (assuming people adhere to it).

Wouldn't you rather be able to plainly see the e-mails that are spam? Or do you prefer to play guessing games when you get an e-mail that says "Hey, what's up?" from a person named "Tom"?

Re:My issues with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

c) Similar to point b. If 99% of people can't figure out how to use the tools they've got, so what? Why not do somthing to help the other 1% of us anyway?

Because it was a waste of fucking resources to benefit only 1% of Internet users. Those people in the 1% probably already don't get spam anyway (I don't get more than a handful a year).

Re:My issues with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Control freak.

Re:My issues with this...

[Kpt Kill]

SE> S.Ex.UALLY---ExPLICIT!~!
SEXUALY EXPLICT

would it really make that much of a difference?
seems to me that filters would have just the same amount of difficulty that they do now

Re:My issues with this...

[JesseL]

AC Wrote:

Because it was a waste of fucking resources to benefit only 1% of Internet users. Those people in the 1% probably already don't get spam anyway (I don't get more than a handful a year).

Just whose resources are being wasted?
Spammers? It doesn't costs them anything to be honest about what they're pushing (it may reduce their profits some though).
Users? I just don't see any waste there, worst case no change, best case massive resource savings.
The FTC? It's done now, if you think this regulation was pointless it will just take more resources to change it back. Maybe there will be some enforcement costs?

I'm savvy enough to know how to filter my mail and definitely get enough spam to be a nuisance (mostly due to a couple postings on public (non porn) newsgroups without obfuscating my address).

Re:My issues with this...

[forgetmenot]

"My gf uses AOL and her inbox is full of this shit daily. I would rather not see SEXUALLY EXPLICIT 100x over and over again as I scroll down the list."

Does your girlfriend know you're reading her email? Let's hope she doesn't read slashdot, you might not have a girlfriend for much longer. :)

Re:My issues with this...

[xs650]

Because she gets better porn than he does.

Re:My issues with this...

[amuro98]

Way back when spam was young, it was proposed that spammers pre-pend [AD] to their subject lines.

It should be obvious how well THAT worked out...

At the begining of this year, we got the CAN-SPAM law which dictates each spam must contain the snail mail address of the company advertising, as well as a working opt-out mechanism. Guess what? I probably see less than 5% of spam actually adhering to this law (not that I as an individual user can take any legal action against the spammers...)

I wasn't even aware spammers were supposed to be putting "sexually explicit" on their porn spams until I read slashdot. All the spam I got continues to ignore this and all other spam laws.

Spammers don't care about legal consequences. The only way to get spammers to pay attention to a spam-law is to pass one that says "Spam is illegal - spammers can be shot on sight." And even then, this would merely result in spammers leaving the US to continue their nefarious and anti-social methods overseas...at least until the rest of the world's nations pass similar laws.

Re:My issues with this...

[sylvester]

porn spam comes with subject lines ranging from (no subject) to "Your Mother Called".

I dunno if you've noticed, but they also come with "From" headers. If "Your mother called" comes from someone other than your roommate, it's spam.

Filtering them without reading them (From the subject and from headers) is not particularly difficult. But filtering them before they get to my inbox would be better.

-Rob

Re:My issues with this...

[MCraigW]

Other than the imaginary sort, slashdoters don't have girl friends...

Re:My issues with this...

[Steve B]

The regulations specifically rule out these tricks. Unfortunately, it's a special case limited to the "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT" header requirement -- the government needs a bit more pressure to do the right thing and treat all such filter-bypass schemes as a technique for illegal intrusion subject to prosecution under the existing computer crime laws.

Re:My issues with this...

[Sylver Dragon]

Alright, what email client do you use (Outlook, Thunderbird, AOL's built in)? You have a board full of geeks, I'm sure some of us are more than willing to help you.
Sadly, as far as I can tell, filtering does not exist in the built-in AOL email client (may be wrong, I've not touched it in many years, but I don't see in information on it in a quick google search). In that case, may I recommend Thunderbird its the email client from Mozilla, and works wonderfully. And again, I'm sure that /. is full of people who can tell you how to get it setup and running.

Re:My issues with this...

[gatorflux]

b) Ok, so they force people to "scroll down" before seeing the image. What about people that have large monitors and email fullscreen? Do we have a set number of 100000000 lines before you see it?


The people who are surfing the web on their Jumbotron will just have to grin and bear it, I guess.

Directly to the Inbox?

[elhaf]

To the inbox? More importantly you can redirect it to a box that doesn't preview automatically as your boss walks by.

Re:Directly to the Inbox?

[mlk]

Or better yet, just forward it all to your boss, then tell his boss about the amount of porn on his desktop, and get a promotion.

Re:Directly to the Inbox?

[Mr.Sharpy]

... preview automatically as your boss walks by.

You use that excuse too?! I thought I was the only one! "Honestly sir, it was Outlooks fault that all this porn is open on my computer! It just automatically previews and opens anything in my inbox, and you know how much of that darned pron spam we get!"

Re:Directly to the Inbox?

[Anonymous Coward]

I want someone to write a virus that forwards the largest jpeg on your HD to your 10 most commonly used e-mail addresses. I can't wait to see GNAA porn that Jesse Helms sends out.

Re:Directly to the Inbox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, that's a good paylod. Just don't dare forge the From address.

Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

there's porn on the Internet?

Re:Wait a minute...

[astellar]

Closer than you think ;) Inside your mailbox ;-)

Re:Wait a minute...

[andy@petdance.com]

This is the operator! Get away from the computer! THE PORN IS COMING FROM INSIDE YOUR MAILBOX!

So does Viagra Spam count?

[billstewart]

I get lots more mail about this than actual porn spam these days. Some of it's more explicit than others....

Re:So does Viagra Spam count?

[Mz6]

Don't you mean V1@_GR.A?

Re:So does Viagra Spam count?

[ackthpt]

I get lots more mail about this than actual porn spam these days. Some of it's more explicit than others....

No, i don't think that's pr0n spam, that's more like medication/pharmacuticals spam and most of what these people are offering to do is illegal on at least on level. Now and then I hear about some warehouse being raided and a few of these trash being rounded up, but you can pretty much bet they aren't really selling the authentic medications, more like placebos. What's so hard about making Sweet-Tart like candies with whatever flavoring you want (icky medicine taste) and stamping on it whatever you want for a brand/product name? (Heck, come to that, that's probably the real reason they raid, because of counterfeit drugs, not because they're trying to sell a contolled substance.)

Re:So does Viagra Spam count?

[billstewart]

The stuff that says "Fake Herbal V1@Gr4 R337 CH33P" or just lists it along with the synthetic opiates isn't pr0n - but a lot of spam spends its time talking about how you'll be able to have hot! horny! sex! all! weekend! because it'll give you 8 inches of hard throbbing hot spam! (Ouch!)

It's working?

[tbase]

I'm actually seeing some mail labeled this way in our junk repository - but all of them violate CAN-SPAM in any number of ways, primarily the fact that they have no return address. I don't know why they bother, other than the fact that they're probably better able to reach their target audience with this method /setting up filter to 'Important Stuff' directory

Re:It's working?

[ackthpt]

I'm actually seeing some mail labeled this way in our junk repository - but all of them violate CAN-SPAM in any number of ways, primarily the fact that they have no return address. I don't know why they bother, other than the fact that they're probably better able to reach their target audience with this method /setting up filter to 'Important Stuff' directory

I bounce all this crap, even the stuff that starts adv@blahblahoffers.com, but they obviously don't pay any attention. Think about it, you blast 250,000 or more emails, are you REALLY going to devote any effort to checking any didn't get through and removing them from your list? Hell, even e-tailers I no longer buy from ignore bounced email. They'd need some serious bandwidth and storage to receive and process that stuff themselves and they don't. I don't think anyone does.

If misleading subjects are made illegal...

[Anonymous Coward]

... only outlaws will use misleading subjects.

hmmm...

pr0n laws

[lone_knight]

Since the majority of the sexually explicit spam originates from overseas, I would be very shocked if this manditory header regulation will help much in filtering out s-e spam. Now, if we could just get them to add "BLONDE", "BRUNETTE", "REDHEAD", etc...

ASCII PORN

[rk2z]

so does this mean that the Receiver ASCII PORN picture crap flood would be on topic?

How?

[Fearless Freep]

I'm not sure how anyone can regulate the content of spam until hey figure out how to prevent the transmission of it in the first place

I guess the big question is...

[teamhasnoi]

Is offering to make my penis big enough to tear an Amazon in two sexually explicit?

And what about if you're easily offended or get your crank turned by Norton of antivirus fame?

Re:I guess the big question is...

[merphle]

Is offering to make my penis big enough to tear an Amazon in two sexually explicit?

Yours can't already? That's odd...
...I just assumed everyone's could...

It seems

[Mz6]

It seems that the FTC thinks that SPAM is handled.

- We don't get any uncolicited emails anymore thanks to their CAN-SPAM act.

- Life is great and it's easy to remove yourself from these lists if you don't want their emails.

How about trying to come up with rules to STOP and regulate unwanted spam altogether before adopting rules to regulate sexually explicit ones? Once the rules come to completeley stop this, non of these new rules even matter!

Re:It seems

[Coelacanth]

How about trying to come up with rules to STOP and regulate unwanted spam altogether before adopting rules to regulate sexually explicit ones? Once the rules come to completeley stop this, non of these new rules even matter!

And what "rules" would those be? The stuff's already illegal, are you going to make a rule that grants spam-battered citizens immunity from prosecution if they successfully locate the spammer and beat him/her to a bloody pulp?

Hey, wait...

Re:It seems

[garcia]

It seems to me that you think that the FTC can regulate spam in the first place... It's obvious that 9 out of 10 spams are going to be originating from another country anyway.

Re:It seems

[Mz6]

I wasn't relying on the FTC at all. I think that everyone, government agencies, software companies, etc.. need to take heed that SPAM will be here to stay. Putting headings in front of the content doesn't change much in the way of it still arriving in my inbox.

Re:It seems

[xsadar]

The stuff's [SPAM's] already illegal . . .

It's only illegal if you don't jump through the hoops set up by the FTC. That's part of the problem. If the government's going to even touch unsoliscited e-mail, they should BAN it, not just say if you're going to send it you have to follow these rules.

Anyway (nothing to do with the parent comment), regarding this latest rule, how is this going to help ensure that it doesn't get sent to minors, even if they can enforce the rule? Yes, I know, parents are supposed to watch their kids every second they're on the Internet, even if they're using it at the public library or elsewhere without their parents' knowledge. Even if they don't ban other kinds of SPAM, they definitely need to ban unsolicited porn.

Re:It seems

[Anonymous Coward]

NO NO NO NO NO!!! Legislation will NEVER "fix" the spam problem because you would have to get EVERY COUNTRY that connects to the Internet to pass IDENTICAL legislation. This way, no matter what country the spam originates from, they broke the same law. I honestly don't think this will happen EVER (unless someone's having a snowball fight in hell).
There is a technical solution that would go a long way towards fixing the spam problem though.
Step 1: Widely implement IPv6. This will prevent spoofed source IP addresses.
Step 2: Implement a replacement for SMTP (call it S-SMTP for secure SMTP) that doesn't allow headers to be modified/forged.
Step 3: Stop accepting all SMTP traffic. Only accept S-SMTP traffic from IPv6 addresses. This is where the users will start taking notice. For a time (perhaps as little as 6 months, up to 2 years) email will be unreliable because not everyone changed over to S-SMTP.

This is NOT going to be easy to fix, but it is doable. If the users want the spam to "go away", they will have to pay the piper. SMTP and IPv4 were developed in academic circles where trust wasn't much of an issue. When exposed to the public-at-large, they are found to have several weaknesses...

Re:It seems

[Deliveranc3]

Well many of the best free industries in the world were built upon the concept of advertising.

Television radio the internet.

Heck half the internet sites you read are supported by advertising.

Also most of the spam you read is actually solicited though indirectly. I have a domain and when I register with a website I use their domain as mye-mail address ie ign@blah.com, gamespy@blah.com and you find what comes out of the woodwork.

Re:It seems

[Delphis]

If the users want the spam to "go away", they will have to pay the piper.

Sounds good to me!

Derek Piper

I can see the weasling now...

[zulux]

Headers will come in mutiple forms that will fullfill the letter of the law, but attempt to foil basic filters:

[SÈXUA?Y-EXPLI?IT]: More Pr0n for you.
SeExUally-Explicit: More pr0n for you:
More pr0n for you (Sexually-Explicit)
[Sexually]-[Explicit]: More pr0n for you

Re:I can see the weasling now...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the FTC press release, one of the clarifications made before the rule was finalized seems to address this:

The final rule requires that the mark appear using elements of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange ("ASCII") character set, and a definition of the term "character" has been added as part of that change.

So no funky Unicode workarounds, nor html character entities (well, in theory anyway).

Re:I can see the weasling now...

[avij]

Those do not fulfill the letter of the law, the regulation was quite clear on this (ie. only ASCII is allowed etc). RTFA.

Re:I can see the weasling now...

[Tony Hoyle]

I've already got some variations..

Sexual:Explicit
Sexually-Explicit
SEXUALLY EXPLICIT:

etc.

You don't have to leave ASCII to generate a few thousand variations.

Re:I can see the weasling now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Variations are violations.

Re:I can see the weasling now...

[KjetilK]

I've got only one of those spams in my reject logs, and it had:

SEXUALLY EXPLICIT :

As others have pointed out, the law specifically disallows those tricks. While spammers probably won't care about making it follow the exact phrase, it should be possible to create a Perl regex that deals with most of it, and that may be something for Spamassassin.

Lying, Cheating, etc

[ackthpt]

Spammers lie, cheat and break the law. I can't see this being enforced succesfully.

I don't know which aspect is more fascinating...

That people actually expect any real help and enforcement from the government.

Or

That anyone who does business with spammers expects to do business with an ethical entity who won't pass along their email address, credit card numbers, etc.

Hacking?

[kdougherty]

What about the people who get on wireless networks that they don't own, then send out tons of spam? Do you really think that they will follow this law? I don't think anyone cares and I really don't see the point in wasting money to make these lame laws that no one will listen to anyway. Use the money for more productive things.

Re:Sexually Explicit: (Does this apply to posts to

[Welsh Dwarf]

Wasn't that shut down recently?

treating spam through legal means

[tacocat]

Well, I think we call all confess that CAN-SPAM pretty much sucks. About the only good thing was the idea that forged headers is recognized as a bad thing but still unenforcable.

How do you fix it? Without all the SPF et al stuff that just makes it harder to send email anyways?

First: Allow anyone, not just some ISP's to sue. That makes it more likely that someone will actually give a shit.

Second: Identify the most offending nations and start putting pressure against them through international Law, Politics, and Economics to get their own shit together.

Failing that, take the largest offending ASN's and just block them out of the entire USA or nuke 'em all.

Some of these suggestions might not be appropriate in an election year...

Re:treating spam through legal means

[Anonymous Coward]

A country that's already killed countless of innocent people in their war for oil should start killing tens of millions with nukes just because of the inconvenience of spam?
Election year or not, i dont think any sane person will agree.

Re:treating spam through legal means

[tacocat]

You don't get much spam, do you?

Some scammers are already compliant

[Anonymous Coward]

For the unlucky few not affected by the plague I
include some actual spam subjects:

SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: I'm sore from too much action
SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:This looks like Fun
SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: You Got lucky This Morning
SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: There's a slut on your desk...
SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: Sexy company while you work

Out of a small sample set of 200 general emails,
I would estimate that about 5% to 10% of
applicable messages are compliant.

Anywhere in the subject line?

[lightspawn]

So if this substring can be found after 300 characters of spaces, is the spammer still complying?

Re:Anywhere in the subject line?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably.. but it still wont stop filters that look for the keyword in the subject, so who cares.. it'll only trick people who dont have filters.. and people who dont have filters are idiots anyway

Re:Anywhere in the subject line?

[avij]

No. See page 7, section ii - "Placement of the Mark in the Subject Line" of this PDF which is linked from the FTC page. The mark has to be in the beginning of the subject line.

Re:Anywhere in the subject line?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

This is why these suggestions about polluting the subject line with ADV or SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT or whatever are misguided.

There are these other things called "headers" in email messages, which are much more suited to this. The FTC might have mandated a machine-readable header, eg:

FTC-Content-Warning: explicit=0.9; fraudulent=0.7

Now we'll have to deal with spammers mispelling "SEXAULLY", or replacing characters with ISO-8859-1 near equivalents, etc. etc.

But hey, the law was made by politicians, not technical people, so what do you expect?

Rich.

Re:Anywhere in the subject line?

[lightspawn]

The mark has to be in the beginning of the subject line.

Oh no!

How is a poor spammer expected to comply with both this and the "ADV:" requirement?

Re:Anywhere in the subject line?

[Doc Scratchnsniff]

Technically, both misspelling and non-ASCII character sets appear to be violations of the rule, according to Section III, technical considerations (ii) and (i), respectively.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

What will they do if it doesn't conform?

Sue the internet?

Not Again...

[DynaSoar]

All power and thanks to the FTC -- they mean well and try hard -- but they end up trying to please everyone and accomplishing nothing. The previous attempts to stop spam (not directly out of FTC offices, but believe me, due in large part to their efforts) proved ineffectual within weeks. This will fare no better.

Of course, I may be wrong. Maybe this will work. Maybe spammers will act responsible for once. And maybe we'll get a visit from the bit fairy, after which Windows won't crash, Macs will be popular, and all version of Linux will install and run first try with no problems.

Here's why

[nanojath]

Here's why the porn industry doesn't like it - because porn spam is ready made for people with "impulse control problems." They don't really care if you, person with reasonable self-control, deletes their spam, as it cost them whatever ridiculous fraction of a cent to send. They really don't like it if Mr. self-recognized porno compulsive can filter their stuff out.

Re:Here's why

[Mz6]

"They really don't like it if Mr. self-recognized porno compulsive can filter their stuff out" And you are assuming of course that the compulsive knows how to filter it out in the first place? And if they are so compulsive, why would they want to in the first place?

Re:Here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

I've learned to love myself for my impulse control problem.

Re:Here's why

[Artifakt]

There are plenty of people who feel they are making bad mistakes in their sex life. Some of them are actually doing things such as flashing or groping random strangers on the subway, or worse. More of them just think that porn is influencing them in a negative way, messing up their attitude towards the opposite sex, (or whatever). To them, there's a big difference between having to go through a few actions to view porn and not getting a chance, or preferably multiple chances, to exercise self control, before the viewing starts.
That's pretty much the definition of compulsive afterall. We don't call a person a compulsive eater because they want to eat all the time, feel just fine about the consequences, and wouldn't change if they could, but because they want to before the fact, but regret having done so after the fact.

Re:Here's why

[nanojath]

dude, loving yourself IS your impulse control problem.

The law IS having an effect

[daves]

Our incoming spam rate, normally a clean, rising, exponential curve, dropped 20% the day CAN-SPAM went into effect. It happened again the day last month that it was announced that 4 had been indicted under the Act.

Of course, spam is still up 30% over the end of last year...

Re:The law IS having an effect

[Desert Raven]

Nice for you, but over here, I'm having to resort to more aggressive filtering all the time, just to keep the spam in my inbox to the same level. Even so, it's not working. Between spam that is designed to get past content filters, and spam originating from compromised broadband systems, it's getting more and more difficult to keep ahead of it.

Personally, I think spam would have significantly dropped if CAN-SPAM had *not* been passed. Several states were just starting to put a real hurt on spammers until the fed shut them down.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[letxa2000]

In this day and age, anyone who isn't using Bayesian filtering for spam protection is just begging for spam. In this day and age, anyone that claims that Bayesian filters can't solve the current spam problem has either tried the wrong Bayesian-based product or doesn't know what he/she is talking about. And those that say Bayesian filtering won't work "forever" because spam will evolve to get around it are preaching gloom and doom about a future that is far from certain.

I've been using Bayesian filtering for 1-1/2 years and my success rate just keeps inching up. In May of last year I was at 99.5% success. My Bayesian corpus has grown in the last year and so far this month I'm averaging 99.98% success--only two have gotten through, and one of those was in a foreign language. I can't even remember the last time a pornographic spam got past my Bayesian filter.

And in the last year we've seen silly attempts to get around Bayesian filters, such as packing the message with lots of random words, or excerpts from books or the Constitution or what have you. Time and time again those messages actually get a higher Bayesian score than they would have if they had just left the random words out.

There is still no known effective way to get around Bayesian filtering. I personally don't think there will be a way around them, but regardless: Bayesian has been the answer for nearly two years and shows no sign of weakening in the near future. USE IT!.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[stevey]

Bayesian filtering is a great solution at stopping you from seeing spam, but it does nothing to actually make it go away.

My big problem is that I have a colocated box which gets 600-900 spam mails a day, they're filtered so I don't see them - but each incoming message still counts towards my monthly bandwidth allowance.

So .. filtering alone is not a solution.

(Sure I could filter at SMTP time, but that's a bit of a hassle to setup and wouldn't allow me to check that I've not missed something important).

Re:The law IS having an effect

[Talonius]

Wouldn't save your bandwidth either as the mail still has to hit your SMTP server, fully transmitted, for the filter to work.

At least with sender authentication systems you can save bandwidth by cutting them off after they fail authentication.

I will admit that Bayesian filtering has improved my ability to use email. I can't think of a false positive in recent memory. However, I've had the same email address for nearly seven years... I average 2k pieces of mail a day now. I had a *lot* of spam to train with.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[letxa2000]

Bayesian filtering is a great solution at stopping you from seeing spam, but it does nothing to actually make it go away.

I'm not going to wait for spam to go away. Bayesian is something we can use now and it lets me get work done (or surf on Slashdot) rather than clicking delete every 2 minutes as my mail icon indicates a new mail has arrived.

Besides, in the end, bandwidth is cheap when compared to my time. If, eventually, someone can figure out how to make spam go away then that'll be a great help to reduce bandwidth usage and reduce server resources needed to filter my mail. But, in the grand scheme of things, that's a relatively small part of the cost of spam. The largest cost of spam is in humans having to take time to deal with it. And Bayesian solves that aspect of the problem.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[Ion Berkley]

Amazingly all the porno spam I got on my yahoo account today actually had the SEUALLY-EXPLICT warning...spammers are taking this seriously it seems.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[Anonymous Coward]

I filter for other people in the company I work for.

I get both ham and spam which both contain just a zip file, just an image, or just a link to a web site that I have never seen before. The zip files can not be filtered because we get customer data that way. I also only get to see the spam not the ham.

How are the Bayesian filters supposed to deal with this?

The "best" way around bayes filtering is to keep your message short.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[StrongAxe]

Wouldn't save your bandwidth either as the mail still has to hit your SMTP server, fully transmitted, for the filter to work.

90% of the spam I get can be recognized by the subject line alone. Once a subject line is recognized as spam, there's no need to receive the body of the message; just drop the connection immediately. For even the smallest spams, this would reduce bandwidth by 50%; longer ones, like Nigerian 419 scams, or ones with embedded graphics (or worse, viruses) would save substantially more.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[BillX]

Well, MY spam level jumped 200% as soon as this new 'postmaster' worm started making the rounds.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[bckrispi]

I never had a problem with Bayesian false positives until I applied for a mortgage. The legitimate mortgage information emailed to me by my loan agent (only 5 emails - but 5 *very important* emails) wound up in my junk folder.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[stry_cat]

Our incoming spam rate, normally a clean, rising, exponential curve, dropped 20% the day CAN-SPAM went into effect. It happened again the day last month that it was announced that 4 had been indicted under the Act.?

Interesting but I don't believe it.

Even after getting my ISP to filter at the server level, and running my own filters, I'm getting more spam than ever. Most of it is for viagra-like drugs, but a large percentage is some interesting porn. I reciently started using Spamcop.net to track and report spam. With the exception of one spammer on a comcast.net IP everything that gets by my filters comes from outside of this country (mainly China).

I'd like someone to post some real data regarding spam.

Looking at Data from Message Labs This CAN-SPAM act has not reduced spam. Infact April was the highest month by far. It looks like May is on track to beat April!

Nope there is not a legislative solution to spam.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[Talonius]

Yea, we're trying to implement server side filtering here so our end users don't have to worry about spam per se but we ran into a huge problem for us.

We're *in* the mortgage business -- title insurance, specifically. Although we added mortgage and our customers to our whitelist we were still repeatedly trashing items that shouldn't have been -- and with server side filtering it's a heck of a lot more difficult to fix.

So we're doing nothing on the server and letting the end user handle it.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[daves]

The Message Labs data actually maps mine pretty closely. Their monthly chart shows a small increase December to January. My daily data shows a sharp drop on the 1st, then the traditional trudge for the rest of the month, with an overall small rise.

As I mentioned, spam continues to be up overall. But, without the two hits, it would be double, instead of 30%.

Don't believe it? Map your own data.

Re:The law IS having an effect

[letxa2000]

I get both ham and spam which both contain just a zip file, just an image, or just a link to a web site that I have never seen before. The zip files can not be filtered because we get customer data that way. I also only get to see the spam not the ham. How are the Bayesian filters supposed to deal with this? The "best" way around bayes filtering is to keep your message short.

YOur points are valid. However:

1. The fact that you get emails with nothing but a zip file, a link, or am image, is NOT typical. So normally there is more to go on. You could be the exception rather than the rule on this point.

2. The message headers are a huge part of what Bayesian considers. Even in the absence of any real content, the headers themselves can make or break the case for spam in many, many cases.

3. Over time you will receive ham with the above characteristics from people you "know" so their particular headers (not to mention the "From" line) will become known to your Bayesian fiter.

4. As with any filter, you can improve performance by whitelisting those you often communicate with.

I really don't see

[Evets]

I really don't see why the US needs to force their sexual discomfort on the rest of the world. US regulations on the web (or any countries for that matter) are not welcome as far as I'm concerned. The internet for the first 10 years I used it represented a truly free society. It seems now that it is a society being pillaged by governments around the world.

Re:I really don't see

[BgJonson79]

Apples and oranges.

The Internet in its first ten years wasn't full of regular people, just techies. The parts of the 'net that are still primarly the domain of the techie are still free.

Besides, if you're no in the US (as has been pointed out many times), you can simply ignore the law.

Re:I really don't see

[ericspinder]

The internet for the first 10 years...

Do you mean from 1962 to 1972. Ok, I re-read you comment and found the you did continue and say "...10 years I used it...", but it's not the governments (or at least not only) pillaging the Internet, but spammers, scammers, and other general criminals. Unfortunately, the only way that any government can deal with an issue is to legislate an answer.

If change didn't happen (good and bad) we wouldn't be able to say in our old age: "back in the day,..."

Re:I really don't see

[stienman]

The internet for the first 10 years I used it represented a truly free society.

What, slow with blinking text?

-Adam

Re:I really don't see

[saderax]

I dont see why people in US ( and those who are not )need to force there lack of morals on me. (this is not an attack, merely a response. I do not have a problem with those who view these materials, however...)I do not view sex sites and detest when i view a mailbox and recieve 200 new emails with nothing but porn/viagra spam.

SexSpam exists. So be it. I cant change that.
People choose to look at it. So be it. I cant change that.

The only reason I applaud attempted resolutions is so that one day in the future, the people who are not interested in it (myself, my young children and relatives) can easily avoid it.

Re:I really don't see

[Graff]

I really don't see why the US needs to force their sexual discomfort on the rest of the world.

If this was about forcing "sexual discomfort" on the rest of the world then the US would be banning and bringing charges upon the sex spammers.

What this is really about is the right of people to ignore what they don't want to see, while others still have the right to watch it. By adding keywords what they are doing is classifying the e-mails. That way one person can filter it into their "junk" folder while another person can filter it into their "yes, please!" folder. The tag is all about informed choices, not about limiting them.

Re:I really don't see

[runderwo]

Who is forcing anything on you? You choose to use the Internet. With that choice, you accept the drawbacks as well as the advantages it brings you. I fail to see where force is even suggested in that.

Re:I really don't see

[platypibri]

And, by your logic, if you hit the highway and a drunk driver plows into you and kills you, well... no one FORCED you to drive, especially not on that stretch of road. If you go to Krispy Kream and grab a doughnut and some freak flashes you his wang, no one FORCED you to indulge in sticky sweet confectionery. That stuff isn't good for you anyway. If you go to a public head and some guy urinates on your leg, no one FORCED you to use a PUBLIC restroom. That guy just has lousy aim and that's one of the drawbacks of public toilets.

Your using the faulty premise that because it is an optional service, you forfeit the right of choice. So, if you undergo "elective" surgery, I hope they cut all the right stuff.

Re:I really don't see

[Our Man In Redmond]

Who says this is about sexual discomfort? If you WANT sexually explicit spam, good for you, route anything with the SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT tag straight to your mailbox and flag it Important.

Me, I'd like to have a heads-up on stuff I didn't ask for and don't want, whether it's sexually explicit material, home mortgages, vacations in Thailand or mailarounds of jokes that were old ten years ago.

Re:I really don't see

[runderwo]

All of your analogies diverge from the matter in that they include demonstrable harm to the subject. There is no demonstrable harm to you downloading spam from your mailbox on your ISP's mail server. If anything, it is the ISP who is harmed by the storage, CPU cycles, and bandwidth that is being eaten by the spam they receive. To the user, it is merely an inconvenience, like a commercial on TV or a billboard on the road. It's the ISP's machines that spammers are exploiting for their own gain, not yours. Only when someone compromises your machine directly (such as using a security vulnerability in your mailer to install spyware) can the responsibility be laid in others' hands.

The thing is, you also have a choice to use a ISP who actively polices for spam and spammers. Such an ISP will cost more (since they are not being subsidized by spammers), but the fact that you have a choice in the matter means that the claim that one is "forced" one way or the other is nothing more than whining hyperbole. Face it. Most people actively make a choice to use a bargain-basement ISP, and they get what they pay for in that regard.

Re:I really don't see

[platypibri]

All of your analogies diverge from the matter in that they include demonstrable harm to the subject.

And who are you to say that porn spam is not harmful? There's a reason we don't let this stuff on TV, and resrict it even on cable. Maybe you like it, or are just ambivalent towards it, but I consider getting images like that in my inbox violating, and I resent the fact that I cannot utilize rich content in my email system just so I don't have to see it. The fact of the matter is that porn has destroyed many marriages. Since I happen to be married, that is a concern to me. (Don't try to argue that it's just a person's choice. We don't let people run around handing out free crack pipes either.) It's also nothing I'd want any kids to see, although the /. crowd is sure to agree that the internet is something we want our children exposed to.
Also, I, like many other slashdotters, pay good money for broadband access, and yet there is no relief, despite what you say about bargain basement ISPs.

And as far as your malware argument, how much of that crap is passed around via email? Most of it! And if I pay for the bandwith, how is that victimizing just my ISP and not me?

The fact is, I could sue the crap out of a company that sent this garbage to my snail mail box. I should have the same rights with "e"mail.

Now, Viagra ads are a whole other thing. I just don't need the stuff, but at least they aren't so... graphic.

One way spam fighting.

[miffo.swe]

The best way possible to fight spam must be to fine the companies marketed by spam. Someone surely forks the dough to get spam invading everyones mailbox. I have a hard time imagine someone sending spam just for fun. By cutting off the money the incentive to spam is reduced and it should wither and become a much smaller problem.

Filtering and making a new shiny mail system dont help. All it does is make the spammers invent new ways to send spam.

What makes spam such a big industry must be the companies who pays for it, go get them!

Re:One way spam fighting.

[poot_rootbeer]

What makes spam such a big industry must be the companies who pays for it, go get them!

How do you prove that the manufacturer of a product mentioned in a spam message actually had anything to do with the spamming?

Can you prove that Pfizer paid for the multitudes of "Viagra" ads deluging your inbox? What if the spammers aren't selling actual Viagra, but rather small bottles of breath mints? What if it was actually Bristol-Myers Squibb that paid the spammers to spam for Viagra, hoping the ensuing backlash would damage their competitor's business?

Re:One way spam fighting.

[cmburns69]

"How do you prove that the manufacturer of a product mentioned in a spam message actually had anything to do with the spamming?"

Excellent point. If the law were to fine a company simply because spam was sent with their name on it, it would be easy for a competitor to send out spam in the name of their competition. (example: CocaCola sends "Drink Pepsi!" spams).

Now I'm Screwed

[tds67]

When I e-mail naked pictures of myself to my friends, I usually use "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:" in the subject line.

Now my friends' e-mail filters will send my e-mails directly to the trash bin. Thanks a lot FTC!

Re:Now I'm Screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

How interesting. When I email naked pictures of you to my friends, I usually use "SEXUALLY-DYSFUNCTIONAL:" in the subject line.

Re:Now I'm Screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the FTC isn't making you lonely. Maybe I can help. a/s/l?

Why clutter the subject?

[photon317]

The Subject line is for human perusal, not for machine categorization. The proper way to implement such a thing has always been an X-header in the email's headers. You could use this to categorize all types of junk spam, allowing mail clients and mail service providers to filter them at will.

Imagine something like:

X-UCE:

Where type is "porn", "commercial", etc... or even use PICS-like content-rating systems in there too.

Why the Subject field???

Re:Why clutter the subject?

[stienman]

Why the Subject field???

Because it's required in all messages, is always displayed in every mailreader, and the instant someone's relay starts messing with the subject line you know it was intentional.

If you make Yet Another Header then you'll get all sorts of excuses (I didn't know how to use it, etc) and relay operators may well 'accidently' filter out that header, etc. Further, no email program now would recognize the new header - it wouldn't be displayed, categorized, etc. All the end user is away of is sender, receipient, subject, body and (maybe) date. Most people don't upgrade their email programs unless prompted to do so by others.

In other words, it would require effort on the part of the end user to benefit from this law, and there are too many variables. This is simple and easy - very hard for a spammer to get out of.

-Adam

Re:Why clutter the subject?

[Mark Shewmaker]

Further, no email program now would recognize the new header - it wouldn't be displayed, categorized, etc.

You don't need a new header for this purpose. There's already one out there that's very well-defined: "Keywords:".

A requirement of a keyword of "ftc.gov:SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT" wouldn't pollute the Subject line and it would be easily filterable by those who wanted to so filter it. Even if every government in the world required a thousand keywords for various types of messages, you could include enough Keywords: headers to account for every one of them.

But if even if merely 50 governments required one keyword each for this type "sexually-explicit" type of content, the subject line would becomes unusable if the keyword had to be put in the Subject, though again not if the keywords were all put into Keywords: body headers.

Furthermore, with specific keywords being required, folks who are worried about over-zeleous prosecution can set their MTA's to simply add that keyword to the Keywords: headers of *all* messages sent through it. That way they'd not have to worry about being in violation of the rule because they or their customers refered to something sexually explicit such as, say, women with bare arms or exposed faces.

Re:Why clutter the subject?

[Our Man In Redmond]

So when your PHB who doesn't know jack about X-headers starts getting mail with SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: in the subject line he can go ballistic and get the company's IT staff to do something about it, whatever it takes, thereby getting Linux into the workplace.

Quite ingenious really.

What about the opposite problem?

[mamba-mamba]

It's fine, in this context, to require sexually explicit material to be labelled as such. But what about the opposite problem, where spammers label their spam as sexually explicit and then it turns out to just be a garden-variety multi-level marketing scam?

I mean, I would imagine that lots of people would check out explicit email once and a while hoping for a thrill, but not if it most of the purportedly explicit material is bogus.

The FCC should fine people who promise explicit material and don't deliver, too. Otherwise they might as well require the label to say "Unsolicited Junk Email".

MM
--

Re:What about the opposite problem?

[Tony Hoyle]

A thrill off 'sexually explicit' email? Boy you must have a sheltered life.... You get worse pictures in the daily newspapers these days (ok maybe not in the US where the sight of a breast caused the entire country to have heart failure, but m the rest of the world it's no big deal).

Re:What about the opposite problem?

[xsadar]

The FCC should fine people who promise explicit material and don't deliver, too.

IANAL, but I think that is called false advertising, which is illegal. (And sorry to point out minor errors, but I think you mean the FTC not the FCC.)

Re:What about the opposite problem?

[Dimensio]

Like spammers aren't already guilty of false advertising in every message that they send.

I can see this law helping.

[FuckFuckFuckFuckFuck]

A lot of the major companies making pornographic videos are based in America. It is an industry worth over a billion dollars. This will affect some businesses. Vivid Video's emails, for instance, as well as Playboy.com's, are going to have to carry this. Note that there was an industry lawyer complaining already. Where there's lawyers, there's affected revenue streams.

It will raise the cost of doing business, and lower the profit margin. It's an incremental step forward.

Does this mean...

[jamonterrell]

that ACs will have to flag their goatse and tubgirl posts on slashdot?

Re:Does this mean...

[jamonterrell]

It's still alive and well at goat.cx

Re:Does this mean...

[atcurtis]

I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.

Of course, the English for historical reasons prefer #390...

Joe Six-Pack take on this

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a geek, honestly. Is it possible to track how a message has been relayed across the net and limit incoming mail to those messages from IP addresses originating outside, say, Nigeria and Eastern Europe? I heard that there are certain IP addresses for certain countries.

Am I horribly naive and lacking knowledge of the latest snappy little acronym which describes this?

You use Preview?

[sulli]

No wonder you get so much spam.

Re:You use Preview?

[elhaf]

Just a joke.

The porn industry is not spammers

[gad_zuki!]

There's a huge difference between legitimate porn sites that keep their noses clean, have good credit, and will not sell your name or credit card to Russian bank frauders and spammers who put up fly-by-night porn sites to get your info and make a quick buck.

Lets not confuse the two because there's overlap in the content. Its like saying "Playboy shows kiddie porn, because they share the word 'porn.'"

Porn Industry != Spammers

[Jonathan Quince]

I don't know why the porn industry is complaining about this,

I can say with some certainty that the "porn industry" isn't complaining about this. All of the best affiliate programs enforce TOS that prohibit spam. (You spam, you get shut down and lose the $$$ in your account that hasn't yet been paid out.) Don't insult the legitimate porn industry by linking them with spammers.

Saying that the "porn industry" protests this regulation is like saying CVS or Walgreens protests regulations on Viagra spam or OfficeMax protests regulations on inkjet cartridge spam. There are legitimate players in the industry, and there are scam artists feeding at the bottom. Guess which group is responsible for the spam.

Of course, none of this means anything about the regulation itself, which will most certainly be ineffectual at reducing spam or filtering porn spam. IME, the only tool that can produce a real impact on spam is a 2x4 applied forcefully to a spammer's skull.

Re:Porn Industry != Spammers

[Backov]

Which is total bullshit, so of course it got modded to +5.

The porn industry by and large - especially the big affiliate programs - LIVES on spam.

They are quite happy to say to the general public that they hate spam. They are also quite happy to turn around and privately negotiate buying sales from "mailers" or "bulkers" (never spammers, no, that's what other people do.)

Those "legitimate players" as you call them make a lot of money off of spam. All of them, pretty much. I could name names but that would be foolish.

I am not sure who you are, but I know some of these spammers and a few of the big (and small and medium) program owners. It sucks, but it's part of the biz.

Re:Porn Industry != Spammers

[No Such Agency]

Don't insult the legitimate porn industry by linking them with spammers.

It shows how awful spam is, when an industry which generates pictures of women (and men I suppose) with two penises simultaneously crammed into their rectums, or drenched in semen, can be insulted by a comparison to them.

Good... let's try to use this to our advantage!

[igrp]

In general, I am against the government getting too involved in anti-spam matters, especially if it's through legislation or code enforcement action. This is mostly because

• History has shown that these measures have a tendency to backfire and, consequently, often make matters worse and not better.
• Government, by definition, has a tendency to restrict individual freedom. Liberties seldomly are taken away by drastic measures or through major legislation, but rather step-by-step. That's why I view government intervention, as described above, as - at least - problematic.

Having said that, I'd suggest that we use this FCC rule to our advantage. Because, realistically, there's not really a lot we can do about it anyway.

The problem, however, becomes an advantage if we view it as just another tool in the anti-spammer's tool box. Yes, it will most likely not help in a lot of cases but it doesn't really have to. It's just another tool, one tool among many others. Maybe it helps to just inconvenience or even shut down a handful of spammers and that's a handful less I have to worry about.

This is the rule I'm using:

[MannyO]

sexually FOLLOWEDBY explicit applied to the subject line.

And here is a sample of what I have blocked:

"SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:" All these girls have one thing in common... their age

SEXUALLY EXPLICIT: Authenic female ejaculation movies!! shocking

SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: I'm sore from too much action

Sexually:Explicit - It only took $40 to get into this Teeen's Panties

Note the different variations of the subject line. ...290 emails so far today for my small/medium size company...

La la la la la

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(*) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(*) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(*) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(*) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(*) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(*) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(*) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(*) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re:La la la la la

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says that regulation could not be augmented with other methods to address the method's weaknesses? There is no single solution to spam.

Re:La la la la la

[parkrrrr]

(*) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering

Missed one.

My Guess...

[ThisIsFred]

...is that the porn industry doesn't like this because filtering doesn't always happen at the terminal point. Just like if there was a requirement for, say, a ".porn" domain, righteous ISPs would probably start filtering through proxies based on that indentifying information. There could conceivably be a majority of ISP customers that ask for this. The problem here is that they really shouldn't have a say over what Joe Porn-fan wants on his PC.

Anyway, no use worrying about it, it's not enforceable. My only regret is that they're going to try, and it will have negligible impact on society or my quality of life, while costing us all in taxes.

Re:Great, but what about spam from outside? NO??

[www.sorehands.com]

Secondly, most of the spam I receive are not even from the US. Most of the stuff is from Asia or worse, eastern Europe. Do these regulations apply to them, too?

It does not apply to them...until.....

they send the spam to servers and recipients in the USA. Jurisdiction is not only based on where they are located, but also where they conduct business and where the harm is directed.

The FTC has filed a lawsuit against the scumbag spammer known as Global Web promotions. I filed a lawsuit against them last year. Their scumbag lawyer has made many misrepresentations to the court. I will be posting it on my site shortly.

My 1/2 cent....

[jwcorder]

I am not an expert on email. I am would say I am not overly smart. I may be in the top 5% in intelligence if you measure the room I am currently in, but that isn't saying much. This is painfully obvious to me that SPAM is going to be a continued problem unless the government takes over email.

Now I realize I am asking to be flamed on this one, but before you do, let me explain.

Imagine what a crap hole the snail mail system would be if it was unregulated from the start. This is the same problem that is faced in todays society through email because no one realized from day one that it would become the medium it is today.

Now many of you may ask, how would you regulate electronic mail? Simply put, the government could require that all email be routed through server farms that were strategically (sp) placed throughout the country.

Once the mail routes through these servers, the servers could scan the headers and tag valid ones as authenic and SPAM as junk mail. You would have an option to be added to a "Do Not Spam List" and you could complain about any unsolicited email that you receive after being added to this list.

Drawbacks to this system are as follows:

1. Out money pays for it through stamp charge if you will to send email.

2. Privacy concerns over the government having easy access to all email messages in the the country.

My rebuttal to these two concerns are that I may actually get a 100 pieces of email that I want to read a month and I would gladly pay 5 to 10 bucks a month to be able to read them in peace. In addition, I would forfeit a small margin of possible privacy invasion to run these bastards out of town.

Before you kill my karma, I will quote Dennis Miller: that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Re:My 1/2 cent....

[codeshack]

That doesn't make a lot of sense -- there's certainly no incentive for the US Government, or anybody else, to try and restrict e-mail, and it's nigh-impossible besides, since it's a point-to-point system. What does make sense, and would be pretty easily implemented, would be a system of controlled points that was optional and privately operated -- the ssh of email, so to speak.

If some lucky philanthropist set up the framework for a system of personal & business e-mail that wasn't dependent on its anonymity, the results would be pretty impressive, and it'd be easy enough to ban spam on such a system. There are enough savvy sysadmins out there (hint, hint) that somebody could draft a protocol and start setting up servers.

It could happen. E-mail's a great concept except when there's an asshole in the system; now we've got about two million of 'em.

Re:My 1/2 cent....

[Kphrak]

Won't work.

1. As you say, there is the privacy angle, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Add to that the massive expense, political wrangling, and "spam breaks" on the part of government to certain groups (politicians, charities, maybe some corporations) and we'd end up with a boondoggle of huge proportions. I work for the federal government and have some first-hand experience with this. Government projects do not mix well with computers, and the less regulated the Internet is, the better for all concerned.

2. Mail outside the country would still have to come into the US (relatives, friends, business partners from all corners of the globe), which would require a spam catcher...which puts us back in the position we started because we already have antispam software at the ISP level, for the most part. Just a lot of it doesn't work very well. At this point, the government would be the mail gateway; they'd buy some POS from a major antispam vendor through GSA (whatever it is, it won't be open source), and we'd have a multi-billion-dollar antispam gateway that doesn't work.

Not to be rude, but if a little voice inside your head starts saying, "Why shouldn't the government just come up with a solution?", you should put your fingers in your ears and start going, "la la la la la can't hear you la la la la!..." It's not the social/political/economic problems of this solution you should be looking at yet; it's just the fact that it won't fly technologically.

Re:My 1/2 cent....

[thomasdelbert]

This is a common flame, but it's depressingly true and very insightful when you are proposing solutions to spam.

I'm not sure how the central control of e-mail is going to be implemented, either simply through legislation or through technical changes in SMTP so some of the checks may only apply to one or the other...

--

Your post advocates a:

(*) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
(*) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
(*) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(*) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(*) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(*) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(*) Outlook
(*) Ineptness of beaurocrats

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(*) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(*) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(*) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(*) Sending email should be free (as in freedom)
(*) Sending email should be free (as in beer)
(*) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(*) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) You're one sorry dude.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

- Thomas;

Re:My 1/2 cent....

[jwcorder]

"there's certainly no incentive for the US Government"

I would utterly disagree. Their incentive is our anger towards the system.

And it wouldn't be impossible. Time comsuming possibly. It would be no different then your work intranet having a gateway to the outside world. This would only be done on a large scale environment. Require that all mail sent through any mail protocol be routed through a proxy server. Not that hard I don't think.

Re:My 1/2 cent....

[rsewill]

I believe people in Congress are looking into the problem of spam.

There is a "Letter from Bill Gates to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Regarding Spam Hearings"
dated Wednesday, May 21st, 2003 at URL: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/misc/billgspam0 5-21-03.asp

I worry when government intervenes too much because government can be extremely heavy-handed.

I would hope the ISPs can act together to deal with SPAM. I would hope government is used as a last resort in either civil or criminal proceedings.

To me, there are 3 problems with the e-mail spam I receive:
1) the e-mail headers are mostly forged.

The only information I can trust is the Received: From field added by my ISP's e-mail service.

2) the e-mail originates or is relayed by a third party.

The third party is also a victim. The third party most likely has virus software originating the e-mail spam or has mis-configured their e-mail server as an open relay.

3) There is no way to get off the e-mail spammers list.

I have no way to complain to the ISP or government authorities about the e-mail spammer. The only hint of the identity of the e-mail spammer is the website being advertized. As another poster noted, the owner of the website can claim ignorance of the actions of the e-mail spammer.

I would suggest the following solution:
1) remove the anonymity of the e-mail sender.

The only way of accomplishing this that I can think of is for all ISP e-mail servers to properly mark the e-mail messages generated by their users.

I realize some people will need anonymity. I would suggest the mark inserted by the ISP can be a number the ISP can map back to the sender. This number will not tell me the identity of the sender, but will enable the ISP to identify the sender. I will then complain to the ISP and/or government agency. If my complaint is valid, the ISP and/or government can take action.

2) Have a list of ISPs and businesses that are willing to guarantee the identity of the sender of the e-mail and guarantee the sender is not a spammer and only do business with an ISP that is on that list and is willing to only accept e-mail from those on that list.

This would mean there are no open sendmail relay servers on the Internet.

This would mean any ISP or business that failed to guarantee the identity of the sender or allowed spamming would be removed from the list and would not be able to send e-mail to the rest of the Internet community until their practices changed.

3) If I have a valid complaint against a user of an ISP, the ISP has to be willing to take action.

ISPs need to write customer agreements saying sending e-mail spam is a violation of the contract and ISPs need to be willing to take civil action against violators.

If the ISP does not take action, I need a way to complain to the people who maintain the list of ISPs with which other ISPs accept e-mail so the offending ISP can be removed from the list.

What a great idea!

[spidergoat2]

Now my 17 year old son and his friends won't have to waste their time actually searching for these sites. Email will readily mark it as such for them. I think it just goes to show we're making things too easy on kids today. He should have to shoplift Playboy just like I did.

Subject line irrelevant

[pjt33]

Right now you can't tell anything from the subject line - porn spam comes with subject lines ranging from (no subject) to "Your Mother Called".

Sure, automated filtering is nice, but I don't need the subject line to filter out spam - I just look at the from address. If you're getting so much spam that you need automated filtering, perhaps it's time to change your address.

Re:Subject line irrelevant

[letxa2000]

Some of us don't like changing our email addresses every few weeks. My email address hasn't changed since 1994. I'm getting about 650 spams per day.

Luckily, with Bayesian filtering we aren't forced to abandon our email addresses to avoid spam. We can keep using the same address we've had for a decade and just lose the spam. Problem solved and no running involved, much less notifying dozens or hundreds of contacts you've established over the years what your new email address is.

Re:Subject line irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're getting so much spam that you need automated filtering, perhaps it's time to change your address.

Except that it's my business address getting spammed. I can't change it. :(

Re:Subject line irrelevant

[pjt33]

Some of us don't like changing our email addresses every few weeks. My email address hasn't changed since 1994. I'm getting about 650 spams per day.

That would make sense under the substitutions s/week/decade/ or s/1994/April/.

Would you now give your e-mail address away in the way you gave it away in 1994? Time was I was quite happy to post my address on the web as a mailto href and the link text of the href. I don't do that with my current address, which I've had since 1999, and I get about one spam a month, without any filters.

Re:Subject line irrelevant

[letxa2000]

Would you now give your e-mail address away in the way you gave it away in 1994? Time was I was quite happy to post my address on the web as a mailto href and the link text of the href. I don't do that with my current address, which I've had since 1999, and I get about one spam a month, without any filters.

Congratulations. Spam isn't a problem for you. Obivously, based on all the noise on the subject, laws being passed, etc. you are not representative of the population as a whole. Spam is a problem for many of us and many of us do not feel that being chased from one email address to the next is an acceptable option. But I'm glad to hear it's worked for you.

SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: probably not applicable

[tverbeek]

does that mean that if you want to talk dirty with your friends, you have to ID each message thusly,

It's a Federal Trade Commission rule, and their purview is limited to commercial activities. So you don't have to label a message telling your friends how this chick sucked on your balls while stroking your dick and fingering your butt... unless you're using this story to try selling Amway® lubricants to your customer-friends.

Re:SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: probably not applicable

[Reziac]

Heh heh... but how about paid-subscription mailing lists, aren't they technically "commercial" since money is involved?

Anyway, point was that this is just way too broad and could have unintended consequences, most likely not to be seen until someone with a twit mentality decides to sue someone else over an honest mistake.

Re:SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: probably not applicable

[nolife]

And exactly how would a mailing list you are specifically paying to recieve be considered SPAM?

Re:SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: probably not applicable

[Reziac]

No, what I'm saying is that this sounds like this could affect mailings OTHER than pure spam, such as mailing lists.

Tho if we can't stop spam entirely, it would be nice if every sort of spam had an appropriate subject line, so morons who want some particular type of spam can get it, and everyone else can more easily shitcan it.

Another article on this

[Anonymous Coward]

Another article on this: Microsoft loves it.

Re:Sexually Explicit: (Does this apply to posts to

[Anonymous Coward]

ahh, so that's where the Hot Grits was poured!

Re:Wait a minute... (Slightly OT)

[Landaras]

Related to the parent's comment...

I can't claim this joke as my own. I'm pretty sure I read it on Slashdot months before.

Everytime I see one of those intelligence-insulting pre-movie commercials telling me that "by downloading movies off the internet I'm causing this stunt man's family to starve," I want to stand up and shout as loud as I can:

"HOLY SHIT!! You mean I can download movies for free off of the Internet??!!"

And then run out of the theater as quickly as I can.

- Neil Wehneman

Re:Sexually Explicit: (Does this apply to posts to

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll just have to click and find out!

cons?

[KnacTheMife]

Given all the complaints about it not being useful, easily bypassed or whatever else, what is the potential harm (if any) caused by requiring SEXUALLY EXPLICIT in the subject line of porn spam? I guess I'm just having trouble seeing the down side.

So Filter You Asshole!

[Anonymous Coward]

Send everything that comes to your GF mailbox w/ SEXUALLY EXPLICIT in the subject to the trash.

Fuck, it's not that difficult and you're acting like you're one of the 99% who don't know how to filter.

No more exuses?

[boristdog]

You mean now when someone gets caught by their spouse/parent/grandparent/SO/support tech with porn on their computer they can't say:

"All I did was open that e-mail. I didn't know that it was porn!"

I hear it every week.

That's a great idea!

[Parandor]

And it would be so nice to enforce similar monikers to all publicity related writings:

DUBIOUS OFFER -- SAVE 30% on a brand new TV set...
POLITICAL PROMISE -- We will LOWER TAXES by 2% in the next 5 years...

Hmm... Ho, just forget it.

Re:Enforcement

[nexus987]

You're assuming that the spam laws we have are going to be enforced. I don't see that happening - I still get dozens of spams a day that don't comply with the CAN-SPAM act. I usually forward 'em with full headers to uce@ftc.gov... I've only heard of a handful of lawsuits..?

Re:Wait a minute... (Slightly OT)

[cloudmaster]

Can I claim that? :)

Re:Wait a minute... (Slightly OT)

[RyanK]

Take it a step further...

Go there with 20 friends (or whatever you can round up) and randomly disperse yourselves throughout the theather, and then make it look like more then one person got the idea. I'd love to see the reactions of the innocent bystanders.

Make it a game, see how many people you can get to join you.

Just wondering

[zogger]

Has anyone here actually gotten any correctly labeled porn spam yet? That will be more of a test of it's effectiveness than anything else really. I am guessing there will be little correctly labeled.

Re:Just wondering

[iminplaya]

I am guessing there will be little correctly labeled.

About 29%?

idiot buyers

[Dog135]

Yeah, I stopped getting "Viagra" spam long ago.

As a side note, what idiot would buy "Viagra" from a company that speeks 1337? If you're going to buy meds from a company, you expect them to at least PRETEND to be professional.

Re: The Postal Service has just as much spam

[kiddailey]

I'm sorry, but the only difference between the US postal system and the email system is that the Postal Service has a monopoly on the delivery of spam.

My mailbox (as well as most, if not all of my neighbors') is flooded daily with bulk mail addressed to "our neighbors at...", "boxholder at..." or "resident." And then there's the credit card company crap that I receive by the hundreds.

Take a trip to the post office and look in the trash bins. You'll find it overflowing with trashed bulk mail that every one of the PO Box holders receives courtesy of the postal service.

Opt-out? You can mail off a request to the DMA or pay $5.00 to do it online (WTF!). But remember: "Although registration with MPS will help to reduce the amount of unsolicited mail that you receive, it will not stop all unsolicited mail."

And then there's the cost of sending postal mail which has increased steadily and with no real obviuos benefit to me.

The last thing I want is to have one organization responsible for delivery of email - and having the power to manipulate and charge for sending/receiving as they see fit.

Also, what is Porn?

[ZipR]

sounds silly, but how does one differentiate?
Will the tons of emails I get to add 2" to my schlong now contain required the subject line? Is that also porn?

Postfix regex for this ...

[rkohutek]

I just put this on my postfix mail server ... works fine: /subject:.*sexual(ly)?.*explicit.*/i REJECT Porn SPAM

Re:how about regular expressions?

[kiddailey]

If you were using OS X Mail and JunkMatcher (or any filter that allows REs for that matter), you could just setup a regular expression and catch those and more:

.*SEXUAL(LY)?.*EXPLICIT.*

Of course, that'll also catch stuff like:

BEAUTIFUL--SEXUAL----MONKEYS---EXPLICT!!

So if you're into sexual monkeys or just want to be more selective about variations, you'll probably want something more like this:

.*SEXUAL(LY)?.EXPLICIT.*

;)

government RFC?

[ricochet81]

Shouldn't the government submit an RFC when they see problems they want to fix? To a programmer, its just bits. Why it is even called "email" is because of an RFC, a standardization in protocol so we could get shit to work together. The government's way of dealing with issues regarding technology is to create some unenforcable law. Unenforceable laws, as it has been stated many times, undermine the WHOLE system and every other law. It is terrible that these knee-jerk whiney legislators or FCC or CONGRESS are doing this to our system. We all know the way to fix technology is to come up with a newer version, or updated RFC. Its time to use the traditional means of fixing a tech problem. Sadly I hear even programmers saying YA!! make a law!! Please think.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Flamebait because I like big titties?

Looks like who have two cocksmoking teabaggers as mods in this discussion.

LK

TASK FORCE

[enforcer999]

There is a task force made up of Federal and state law enforcement agencies addressing many of the concerns or problems that slashdotters have brought up today. I believe one of the most important aspects of this task force is not the prosecution of spammers, but rather the educational efforts by these agencies for consumers and businesses. On another note: The American Teleservices Association filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the National Do Not Call Registry. It the Court takes the case, I do not believe that they will over turn the 10th Circuit's decision.

Re:TASK FORCE

[enforcer999]

Sorry, I am still not done. You should read this HREF="http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/muris/040520spam emailtest.pdf">testimony from Tim Muris. Law enforcement do know the inherent problems with enforcing any spam laws. This testimony gives a good example of things that are being done and the issues that are understood by many of us. If you guys have any suggestions in fighting spam other than what is in this paper, let us know.

Re:TASK FORCE

[enforcer999]

I am linked challenged today. Sorry. http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/muris/040520spamemailt est.pdf

Re:Wait a minute... (Slightly OT)

[bziman]

Everytime I see one of those intelligence-insulting pre-movie commercials telling me that "by downloading movies off the internet I'm causing this stunt man's family to starve," I want to stand up and shout as loud as I can:

"HOLY SHIT!! You mean I can download movies for free off of the Internet??!!"

And then run out of the theater as quickly as I can.

I have a similar reaction, except I really do tend to stand up and shout as loudly as I can: "YOU MORONS, I'M FUCKING HERE IN THE THEATRE WATCHING THE DAMN MOVIE! INSULT SOMEONE ELSE!" And then I get dirty looks from all of the retards in the theatre who are allowing our government to become a totalitarian dictatorship... Okay, so perhaps I'm feeling bitter today...

wrong, wrong, wrong.

[jCaT]

wrong, wrong, wrong. The law enuerates that you must have the following ASCII characters in the following order as the first nineteen characters of the email:

SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:

Nineteen, as it includes the space at the end, immediately folowing the colon. I guess since nobody around here reads the articles, it's a bit much to think they would actually read the law referenced.

Huge loophole

[jCaT]

Disclaimer: I work for a company that maintains double opt-in lists of people who want to get "free porn" in their inboxes. The "free porn" we send out is mostly ads for paysites, but we also do actually send out actual "free porn" as well. We require people to:
-put their email address in on a site
-receive an email from us
-click on a link in that email to validate their email address
-use their email address as a username and the provided password to log into our members area
-verify that they are 18, and agree to our terms of service

So, yes, our list truly is double-opt in mail. I don't want to hear anything about how we're evil spammers, these people asked for it.

The big loophole in the FTC ruling is the second part. Paragraph (a) is the text that enumerates all of the rules that need to be followed to be compliant with the law. Here's Paragraph (b):

(b) Prior affirmative consent. Paragraph (a) of this section does not apply to the transmission of an electronic mail message if the recipient has given prior affirmative consent to receipt of the message.

I can tell you right now that a lot of cases brought up against people sending out mail will be defeated by this part of the rule. A lot of adult sites have this "prior affirmative consent" buried in the terms of service of the sites you join, so that once you cancel your membership they can start spamming you relentlessly, or even sell your email address to a third party who now has "prior affirmative consent."

The only messages we have to watch out for are the reminders we send to people to either confirm their subscriptions to the service or opt out entirely. The rest of the mail we are sending out does not have any of this stuff on it.

Re:Wait a minute... (Slightly OT)

[fltsimbuff]

I haven't seen those announcements myself... but That's just stupid. The actors get filthy rich, and the stunt man's family starves? If that's not a lie, the people involved in the contracts, are morons.

Effective, antispam 1-2 punch. Problem solved.

[iamcf13]

Aggressive SMTP filtering.

Aggressive POP3 mail filtering.

Without scrapping SMTP/POP3 for something else that doesn't have the ubiquitous presence and widespread acceptance as an email transport medium as SMTP/POP3, what more can be done?

For the record, below is one 'shining' example of mindless abuse comitted, filtered by CF13, documented, and recently reported to a 'blackhole ip list' site:
(all email addresses and message id's below are 'munged' by replacing @ with 0x40 except for iamcf13@hotpop.com. This way, people who don't have effective spam filtering are spared needless spam.
Also the name of my pc in the message id has been changed to [mypc] for privacy reasons as this is being posted in a public forum.)

--- Draft copy of actual sent email below ---
--- Had to edit the content below ---
--- to get past the lameness filter ---

From: iamcf13@hotpop.com --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
To: submissions0x40ahbl.org --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
Subject: BLACKLIST ABUSIVE, MALWARE SENDING IP REQUEST: 0330088S-DNS.AC-BORDEAUX.FR [195.83.187.234] --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:

BLACKLIST ABUSIVE, MALWARE SENDING IP REQUEST: 0330088S-DNS.AC-BORDEAUX.FR [195.83.187.234] --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:

ac-bordeaux.fr on file at rfc-ignorant.org so it is pointless to contact them. --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:

Please pass this information on to the appropriate news.admin.net-abuse Usenet newsgroup. --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:

Regards, --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:

Bryan Taylor --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:

--- non-working postmaster0x40ac-bordeaux.fr addressess per rfc-ignorant.org ---

Return-Path: --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
Received: from mx1.ac-bordeaux.fr (picsou.ac-bordeaux.fr [194.199.33.126]) --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
by mx2.hotpop.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 93B963FA035 --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
for ; Mon, 3 May 2004 13:04:08 +0000 (UTC) --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
To: iamcf13@hotpop.com --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
From: Mail Administrator --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
Reply-To: Mail Administrator --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
Subject: Mail System Error - Returned Mail --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
Date: Mon, 3 May 2004 15:29:19 +0200 --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
Message-Id: --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
MIME-Version: 1.0 --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=delivery-status; --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
Boundary="=_ _= 9711519(17729+1117966264)" --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
X-HotPOP-Delivered-To: iamcf13@hotpop.com --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:

--=_ _= 9711519(17729+1117966264) --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:

This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason: --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:

Your message was not delivered because the destination computer was --Ignore this text, its for the Slashdot lameness filter:
not found. C

What a about yahoo groups?

[TrickyRick]

What if you subscibe to a yahoo group that tends to be sexually expicit but you get spam from people about stuff that is not the subject of the group but they say they are spam because you subscribe to the group even though the group might be Pregnant pics and they are addvertising a gay personals site or something like that.

Will they be required to mark there messages sexually-explicit?

ISPs can block SPAM before it reaches the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I'm all for a .sex top level domain and implementing a trusted email server architecture, I'm happy that the FCC is starting to enforce things.

ISPs can be proactive and block outgoing messages with this subject line string, hopefully sparing the Internet's bandwidth, not just our inboxes.

here's why

[sootman]

"I don't know why the porn industry is complaining about this, it seems like now everyone who really wants porn spam (not I!) can finally create a filter that delivers it to their inbox, highlighted, and bolded!"

Because spammers do not give a fuck if you want to hear their message or not. They want *everyone* to hear it, period. I imagine their thinking is like your mom's when she wanted you to try a new food--how do you know you don't like it if you don't try it? How do you *know* you don't want to see h0t l3sbi4n 5lut5 until you've read the message and seen the pic?

Until there is a government (or mafia; I really don't care which) agency that you can forward a SPAM to and they will track the spammer down and kill them, the only way to keep spam out of your inbox is through technilogical means.

Here's my first one

[Anonymous Coward]

and it slipped through my subject filter:

SEXUALLY EXPLlClT: secret sex lives of older women EXPOSED! indiscreet - - - - evaluation

Just notice the i's in explicit. I hate this stuff.

highlighted, and bolded

[Lord Apathy]

I'm already putting together the procmail recipie to do just this.

This idiocy is because of Outlook Express users

[0x0d0a]

The proper technical way to do this, if the approach was actually feasible, would be to use an additional header, perhaps X-Sexually-Explicit. However, Outlook Express is a crippled email client that cannot filter based on arbitrary headers. Many people use this client, therefore the rest of us must suffer abuse of the Subject line.

Re:What about spam from other countries?

[ozbird]

Trade agreements (carrot) or sanctions (stick) - it's the FTC way.

No more sporn

[blissfilled69]

We shall miss thee

Yep...

[rune2]

On the Internet porn finds you! (and not just in Soviet Russia either)

Great... now how do I report abuse?

[WareW01f]

I'm already seeing "Sexually:Explicit -" (rather than "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:" It says in Part 316.1.a.1:

Exclude sexually oriented materials from the subject heading for the electronic mail message and include in the subject heading the phrase "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:" in capital letters as the first nineteen (19) characters at the beginning of the subject line

I ready for some FTC smack down, were do I start?

Re:Wait a minute... (Slightly OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet! It's Comic Book Guy!

Who in the porn industry opposes this?

[autopr0n]

As far as I know, the "legitimate" porn industry has a strict ban on SPAM.

Anyway, I'm nominaly in the porn industry (I guess), and while sexualy explicit SPAM dosn't bother me much more then any other kind, I'm happy for any tool that helps me cut down the garbage in my email box.

A relief

[Anonymous Coward]

Im sure itll work as well as the earlier laws forcing spam to be labelled as such.

Re: what is the law? what is "solicited"

[H310iSe]

Any idea about the definition of unsolicited and sexually explicit? I'm serious, for example, of someone has a sign-up list that at some point (say 5 years ago) had no confirmation so people could sign up to their list without having to prove the email address they were signing up was in fact theirs, and if the company has unsubscribed people as they've requested (hrm, can the company prove that though?) and has since moved to a confirmed sign up system, if someone complains they've received unsolicted porn what would happen?

I run one list giving discout admission coupons to adult venues, we get 10-20 spam complaints a month, all from AOL users (with that "this is spam" checkbox) and 90% are fully confirmed addresses, the remainder are from the original import of unconfirmed addresses - never bought, never tricked, never sold, we used to just ask people who signed up what email address they wanted to send the mailing to ... it was a more innocent age.

You see my point? Someone could royally mess with us, hell, I could go to jail, and I don't think I've done anything wrong. I supposed I could throw out those old, unconfirmed addresses, seems a bit drastic though. Our reply-to address is legit and monitored, our unsubscribe link works, our real mailing address is listed, it's so god-damn above-the-board it makes me ill, but i'm still worried.

I'm sure there are other examples, how do you know if the addressee is considered solicited or unsolicited? And I'm not even starting on how to know if something is sexually explicit. My god, certainly no advert featuring the cover of any teen-or-older women's magazine could pass for nonsexually explicit...

I hope it works as well as the other spam laws!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfffft.

Snicker.

Cry.

Check out my awesome anime channel on EFnet #anime-etc

^_^

I have no life. No job. No future.

Re: what is the law? what is "solicited"

[Syncalot]

one word of advice scrub out AOL.. :) their is a bigger issue here, say you follow the rules for sending out spam, whats their to stop the people from complaing and getting your isp or worse the ftc involved even tho you did follow the rules? seems like the end users have the say and depending on how many people voice their issues with spam it will always be up to you to prove you did the right thing and followed the rules..

Re:Wait a minute... (Slightly OT)

[karmatic]

I always make it a habit to come home and download something else, something I wouldn't have bothered with before.

So far, I'm up to 22 downloads, just because of that "copying a movie is like stealing a candy bar" commercial.