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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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?

[Anne Thwacks]

Thats what cruise missiles are for.

April Fool's Joke???

[Vexler]

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

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...

[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...

[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???

Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

there's porn on the Internet?

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....

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

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

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.

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...

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...

[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.

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.

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?

[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?

[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?

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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

[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!

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???

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
--

Does this mean...

[jamonterrell]

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

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.

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

[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....

[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;

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.

Re:treating spam through legal means

[tacocat]

You don't get much spam, do you?

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

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.