Posted on 12/08/2003 3:52:35 PM PST by yonif
WASHINGTON — Congress on Monday approved the first national effort to stem the flood of unwanted e-mail pitches offering prescription drugs, cheap loans and other come-ons.
President Bush has indicated he intends to sign the measure into law. Indeed the White House revamped its own e-mail system this summer over a flood of so-called spam.
Clogged inboxes have become a leading irritation among Internet users, an increasing business expense for companies and a popular target for Washington interest before an election year.
The House voted without dissent to approve slight changes Senate lawmakers made to the "can spam" legislation, which would outlaw the shadiest techniques used by the Internet’s most prolific e-mailers, who send tens of millions of messages each day. The bill would supplant tougher anti-spam laws already passed in some states, including a California law that takes effect Jan. 1.
The bill was among the farthest-reaching Internet measures approved during the Bush administration, which has largely continued the Clinton administration’s hands-off approach toward regulating America’s technology industry. The last such major legislation was a 1998 law banning Web sites from collecting personal information from children under 13.
The anti-spam bill encourages the Federal Trade Commission to create a do-not-spam list of e-mail addresses and includes penalties for spammers of up to five years in prison in rare circumstances. The Senate previously voted 97-0 to approve the bill.
The legislation would prohibit senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail from disguising their identity by using a false return address or misleading subject line. It also would prohibit senders from harvesting addresses off Web sites and require such e-mails to include a mechanism so recipients could indicate they did not want future mass mailings.
"This is one of the more sweeping Internet regulatory schemes we’ve seen," said Alan Davidson of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology. Although he criticized parts of the anti-spam bill, he said consumer frustration was driving lawmakers.
"Most people are going to be glad this bill is heading to the president soon," he said.
Some critics said the bill didn’t go far enough to discourage unwanted e-mails. The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mails called the congressional effort "really disappointing." The group prefers a law requiring marketers to obtain someone’s permission before sending them any e-mails. It said the alternative method of consumers asking marketers not to send them any more messages hasn’t worked.
"What Congress is effectively doing is ignoring these laws that haven’t worked everywhere else they’ve tried," said the group’s spokesman, John Mozena. "This bill fails the most basic tests for anti-spam legislation; it doesn’t tell anybody not to spam."
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I only read a few newsgroups these days, but I've found that most spam (and most flames) are crossposted to many newsgroups. By using a newsreader that filters out postings that were posted to more than two newsgroups, I see very little Usenet spam.
However, I do still get email spam to the address I use for posting. But, since messages to that address are used to update my Bayes filter and go directly into the bit-bucket thereafter, they are actually doing me a favor -- similar subsequent messages from other sources will be marked as Spam.
Like this law is really going to stop or even significantly reduce spam?
I read an article a couple of months ago, that was talking about the measures that major spam operators were taking, in preparation for just this eventuality. These are the companies who send spam for other people. They were setting up shop in foreign countries, where they can continue to spam US citizens with impunity.
They will be offering anonymous email response addresses and anonymous web space for URL links. Access to that email and those web forms, by the US and foreign based spammers, will be through Anonymizer links, with encrypted data, so US law enforcement won't be able to track it. Other major spam operators are even setting up service centers, that will handle all of the responses for the US based spammer and simply deposit the profits in the US based spammer's bank account - from different non-spam related companies, every month. That way, the US based spammer never has to contact the spam operator, after setting up his account.
This law may cause a short reprieve in the spam that we receive, while the spam operators shift their operations offshore. But, once they get settled in countries like China and some of the old Soviet republics, the spam will continue unabated. About the only thing that it might stop, is the mortgage, cell phone and dating service related spam, since they are all going to be US based services that can be traced. But, don't be fooled into believing that this law will stop spam for viagra, weight loss pills, body member enlargement pills, the latest toy or fad, sexually explicit web sites or the guys who will give you a million dollars if you help them launder the 10 million dollars that their father took out of [insert name of African country here], since those spammers can operate entirely offshore. The products can be shipped from a foreign country. The web sites can be located in a foreign country. And the Nigerian scam operators almost always operate out of one of three African countries, where they know that they will not be prosecuted.
This is nothing more than election year hype, that will have little real and lasting effect. As Macbeth would have said, "it is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
It's important that your spam filter runs on your own computer, rather than your ISP's server, so you can verify that nothing good was identified as spam. That way, all that you have to do is flip over to your spam folder once a day and scan the "from" addresses for any address that you might recognize. Since it is very unlikely that anything in the spam folder is going to be good, scanning as many as 100 addresses, should only take you about 30 to 40 seconds. If you don't see anything that was incorrectly quarantined, just select all (in most cases, Ctrl-A or Mac Cmd-A) and delete.
That's it. No hassle. No meaningless legislation. Just a couple of clicks, once a day.
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