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No Federal Do-Not-Spam Registry For Now

Posted by michael on from the what-me-worry dept.

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "The AP reports today that the U.S. government has no plans to create a do-not-spam registry in the immediate future. Why not? They argue that the proper technology is not yet in place. 'A national do-not-e-mail registry, without a system in place to authenticate the origin of e-mail messages, would fail to reduce the burden of spam and may even increase the amount of spam received by consumers,' said the commission." The moral of the story is: never try. See the FTC's press release or their report (pdf).

3 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. The moral of this story is... by mabu · · Score: 0, Troll
    Moderators do not RTFA


    "A national do-not-e-mail registry, without a system in place to authenticate the origin of e-mail messages, would fail to reduce the burden of spam and may even increase the amount of spam received by consumers," the commission said.

    If new authentication plans fail to emerge, the FTC will convene a federal advisory committee to determine whether the government could require Internet providers to adopt one.
  2. Re:The real moral is by jkabbe · · Score: 1, Troll

    The perfect solution would be to encode each email address using a one way hash. No email address could then be retrieved using it.

    Yeah, because no one has ever found out passwords that were encoding using a one-way encryption by doing something like encrypting the entire dictionary and looking for matches....or something....

  3. Re:I Don't Want the Gov't Telling Me What's Spam! by jkabbe · · Score: 1, Troll

    Just deliberately misspelling words to evade filters shows that the spammer is aware their actions are harrassment, and not a free speech issue at all.

    If a spammer sends me 50 emails on the same subject it is still harrassment even if my filter correctly places them in the junk folder. If a spammer sends me a single email with funky wording it would not be harrassment. It might violate spam laws, but it wouldn't be harrassment.