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FTC Defines Spam
Iphtashu Fitz writes "The FTC has just issued its final report on how it will define Spam with regards to the federal CAN-SPAM act. According to the FTC, bulk e-mail is commercial if it includes advertising and promotion or if the subject line or beginning of the message would be reasonably considered to be advertising or promotion. This is very similar to the proposed rules that were announced back in August. The modified rules also deal with the issues of transactional messages (an e-mail regarding an order that also includes advertising) and relationship-based e-mail (messages about product updates, etc)."
And it hardly includes everything. What about those freaky religious spams from strange cults trying to save my soul? And what about spam in some weird language that my mail reader can't even render properly, with a free bonus virus attachment? What about spam that has no subject or message, just a url to a website (or even a picture)? Personally I think we should just broaden the definition of spam to be "any weird crap that I didn't ask for in my inbox" and be done with it.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
``Unsolicited bulk email'' seems like a pretty good definition to me, but I guess that's not quite good enough for the brainiacs at FTC.
See what I've been reading.
Yahoo's business model for it's mailing list service (Yahoo Groups) is to attach ads to 'legitimate' mail it's users send.
These mails fit the new definition of spam: "bulk e-mail is commercial if it includes advertising and promotion ".
The same also applies to Topica, and no doubt many other ad-funded list servers.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I mean, "Greetings, I am the son of the former Nigerian dictator" isn't advertising or promotional, is it?
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I really don't care what the definition of Commercial Bulk Email is in the context of Spam.
Someone is abusing the email network if:
They are intentionally sending email messages to a bunch of people who didn't ask for them.
Counterexample?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
The FTC defining spam is the first step to a "protected speech" claim by at least a segment of the direct email marketing industry. Laws are going to be inneffective due to the interrnational nature of the problem, and due to the sub-sub-sub-contractor practices that dominate.
The only possibly effective remedy I have come accross is the widespread addoption of SPF (as long as domains are publishing sufficiently restrictive policies), beysian filters, and blacklisting (either by users, by admins, or some combination of both).
Before anyone gets thier panties in a knot over blacklisting, SPF changes the nature of blacklisting by making it possible to identify which persons, hosts, or domains are responsible for the offending emails. The problem of false positives goes away if sending and recieving domains are using SPF (and the persons maintaining the blacklist are behaving in a reasonable manner).
The FTC cannot define spam, as what is spam to one might be truffles and cheese to another. Only I can decide what is spam (in my account). Quit bugging the legislators and start bugging the admins (or, better yet, the executives) to implement some simple, common sense measures (such as, if it originates at a "martian IP addy", it's probably not wanted), checking the legitimacy of the sender (SPF), allowing your users to help identify spam by submitting examples for your beyesian filters, and taking part in creating/maintaining a blacklist of the very worst offenders.
Read, L
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) 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 vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) 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
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive
( ) 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
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked
( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) 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
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) 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
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will 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!
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
There is no way. If they're planning to hop servers to avoid blacklisting, they already know the possible consequences and don't care. My advice is to start looking for a job right now, and get out of there ASAP. Don't do anything to sabotage the project, either now or after you leave; you don't want to descend to their level. Of course, making sure the spam hunters know exactly where it came from isn't sabotage...
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The FTC has to stick "commercial" in there somewhere, because that's the only way it has jurisdiction. Remember, it's the Federal Trade Commission.
We make it unprofitable for the those that distribute spam. Now most of you are probably thinking that I'm talking about the spammers, but this is a problem that existed long before the internet.
Look at the Postal Service. How many unwanted items, advertisements, credit card offers, coupons, etc... get delivered that are immediately thrown in the trash? And if you write return to sender on the next Capitol One credit card offer, or on the next AOL CD you receive, the USPS knows to just throw it in the trash instead of returning it. Why?, because they have already made a profit.
Look at your telephone service. How many people actually have to screen their calls with answering machines and caller-id to avoid those annoying interruptions and solicitations during dinner or at odd hours? Why is block caller-id even available if it wasn't profitable.
Now look at SPAM. Once again, we all know about the annoyances of this junk.
Asking the government to enforce any kind of policy to prevent it is rediculous. First of all, Spam through the postal mail is probably what is keeping residential postal rates so cheap. Now herein lies the rub. If it can be done legally through the govt. postal service, all other avenues are fair game. And so the legal finger pointing begins, if he can do it, so can I.
When the govt. has it's own hands in the same honeypot that telemarketers, spammers, and bulk-mailers do, it's a no win situation.
Until that changes, avoiding spam without having to download some anti-spam tool, or anti-pop-up browser, or placing a no soliciting sign on your front door, it won't stop. Call me cynical, or even a conspiracy theorist, but public nuisances normally follow trends. One of the true pleasures of living in a capalist society.
So if I make a post to a mailing list advocating the use of such-and-so software for solving some problem, like filtering spam, does that make me a spammer?
Honestly, they can call it whatever the heck they want. It's like trying to define porn. "I don't know how to define it, but I'll sure know it when I see it." We have a lot of filtering systems that seem to be much more effective at identifying spam than the congress-critters can. So if you don't mind, I'll just keep by bogofilter and ignore the rest.
It's fairly obvious that the U.S. Congress is not longer representative of the people who elect them. They get spam and they know what it is. We get spam and we know what it is. So why do you think it is that they just can't make a determination of what spam actually is?
How about something like this: If I didn't ask for it, or I don't already know who you are via mailing lists, orginazations that I belong to, or products that I have purchased directly from your company and have selected the "send me mail" box (which is OFF by default) then you are spam. In short -- no cold calling on the internet.
How hard can that be to actually write down? I did it and I'm not a congress-critter.