The Senate has passed some anti-spam legislation. Now, of course, it has to go to the House, and then be signed by the President, before it becomes law.
The tricky thing about anti-spam legislation is that it has to protect the individual's right to send email freely, while putting a stop to the annoying and costly problem of unsolicited bulk email. And it is costly; there's an actual dollar cost associated with dealing with all that commercial email. The resources tied up in processing all this junk mail are a real economic and social problem. Well over half of all email processed by internet mail servers is now spam. That costs money, it really does. That's not even counting the lost productivity from having to delete all that crap that shows up in your mailbox. I especially feel for dialup users; at one point I had a dialup account and an email address that was so glutted by spam, more than 9 out of 10 emails I got were spam, and I spent at least 15 minutes a day just downloading and deleting all that crap. I eventually had to shut down the email address, it was so bad. This on an email address I had used for several years, and that lots of my friends and business associates knew me by.
I have long believed that we need some sort of internet equivalent of a "No Solicitors" sign. In America, at least in many jurisdictions, anyone who wants to can put a small sign on or near their front doors--and it can be quite small, and fairly unobtrusive--that simply says, "No solicitors." This means that salesmen are not allowed to knock on your door to try to sell you something. Any such salesmen who knock your door are subject to a small fine. It's not a big fine, but if they rack up a number of violations that make their cost of doing business prohibitive.
I like this approach. It presents no danger to the casual solicitor. Your local Girl Scout trying to sell cookies or somesuch will probably not be prosecuted, and in the bizarre likelihood that she is, the fine she faces is utterly trivial (20 bucks or something like that). But it prevents an excessive number of companies from sending hordes of salesmen to knock your door on a regular basis.
Telemarkers and bill collectors face the same predicament. They have laws that limit the hours in which they can call you, and how often they can call you. A single violation, accidental or intentional, is trivial in its cost. But habitual violators rack up huge costs, because every violation costs them more money.
I have long believed that this is the approach we need to deal with excessive spamming. We just need bulk emailers to be required to provide a working, valid email address in the reply-to line, and to be required to keep a "do not mail me anymore" list. People who violate this list should face a small fine--something on the order of $5-$10 per violation I should think. That way your local CPA who emails 200 of his closest friends soliciting business is probably not in any real threat, but a company that tries to mail out to millions of people at random hoping for a response will be severely punished.
I really hope that any Federal legislation we get works along those lines.
Make no mistake: I do believe that commercial speech is protected under the 1st amendment, and should be. But your right to free speech doesn't include a right to hold a political rally in the middle of my neighborhood at 2:00 in the morning, nor to bang my door at 5 am to harangue me about why I shouldn't have voted for George Bush. Spammers should be held to similar standards of accountability.
I hope the Feds get this one right.
A few problems with your suggestion:
1) It's easy to pass legislation that requires bulk emailers to include a real e-mail address, but how are you going to track down and punish those who don't? You can't.
2) How can you prevent your proposal from being used against innocent parties (i.e. the "joe job")? You can't; e-mail addresses can be forged easily, and if I send out a million spams with your e-mail address on them, you (who did nothing) could be on the hook for millions.
3) What is to keep spammers from using mail servers in countries with more permissive laws and ignoring ours entirely? Nothing.
So, no, the sort of situation you propose won't work without some kind of authenticated e-mail system that guarantees the identity of the sender. They're working on that, but once they have it, you won't need the legislation anymore; the technical solution will suffice.
90% or more of the spam I get is illegitimate - viruses, scams, frauds, etc. Legal solutions wouldn't stop that any more than gun registration laws keep guns away from criminals. I think the solution needs to be technology driven - ie some modification to email format that requires traceable address confirmation by the sender.
BTW: solicitOrs
1) It's easy to pass legislation that requires bulk emailers to include a real e-mail address, but how are you going to track down and punish those who don't? You can't.
You're not getting it, Jerry.
If the state's attorney or the law-enforcement authorities get a complaint about someone sending out an email without a valid return address, all they have to do is investigate.
When will they investigate? When they have enough examples of same that appear to be from the same source. So if there are or two such complaints on the same email, it's not worth their while to persue. But dozens or hundreds? Now maybe it is.
With thousands of complaints, they now have a case where they can hit someone with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines. So all they have to do is some internet sleuthing to track 'em down.
This will take many dozens, maybe hundreds, of man-hours to track down. But that's what we pay 'em for. Since the perps did it thousands of times, it's worth persuing them for.
This is what we pay cops for. It's not unreasonable at all, and would work quite well.
2) How can you prevent your proposal from being used against innocent parties (i.e. the "joe job")?
I think I already addressed this. Your average state's attorney or cop is going to look at the situation and say, "How much of my time is it worth to track this violator down?" The local Girl Scout who violated the law is extremely unlikely to be tracked down unless the cop or DA has a hair up his ass. Even in such a case, what the violator faces in terms of penalty is fairly trivial. Any judge faced with the Girl Scout case is going to say, "Why the fuck are you bringing this into my courtroom?"
3) What is to keep spammers from using mail servers in countries with more permissive laws and ignoring ours entirely?
There are two fairly straightforward answers to this. First: If you run a business located anywhere in the United States and you contract a company outside the US to do this for you, you're guilty. Problem solved.
Second: If you're a business located entirely outside the United States, then we either persue you in international criminal court, or we just deal with the fact that a certain percentage of you are going to get away with it because you aren't worth going after.
We need to understand something about the law: it can't get everyone who violates the law. It never can.
I don't think that anti-spam legislation can do with spam. I only want the legislation to get the problem--which costs us billions of dollars--to be brought down to manageable levels.
There are so many ways to disguise the origin of e-mail that it is simply impossible to determine who actually sent it. If you can't determine who sent it, you can't figure out who to go after and you can't know whether you are harassing an innocent party. I'm not saying it's very hard and would require a lot of time and manpower, I'm saying that it is technically impossible. Find me an open SOCKS proxy in eastern Europe and an open SMTP relay in Korea and I guarantee you that you'll never trace my spam back to me.
Sure, if I put a phone number in there so you can call and order my crap, you might be able to find me. But you still can't prove I sent the spam! I could be being joe-jobbed by one of my competitors or a disgruntled customer, and that's exactly what I'll claim. If you make sending spam an actaul crime, then you are up against reasonable doubt, which is easy to create in a case like this. You might have better luck letting the class-action lawyers at it; you only need a preponderance of the evidence in civil suits.
Again, if you beef up e-mail so you can actually tell who sent it, then you don't need laws. You just reject any mail not sent by a verifiable sender and all the spammers slink away with their tails between their legs.
The correct amount of spam in my mailbox is none. The ultimate solutions will be technical.
Jerry, even at that point you will need to have some law or regulation along the lines of the 'no solictors' sign, so that people can't just send you emails with real email addresses. Any form of identification that can be given over electronic media can be created for a spam-bot just as easily as for a human. And automated mailing lists would require some solution on how to pass on mail from bots.
But any legal solution is too open for abuse, and I don't like civil law solutions either, because it is still to easy to frame someone.
commercial speech is protected under the 1st amendment
It would be intresting to hear your rational for that. Maybe you could write a post.
As long as the spam-bot has a traceable address, I think most of the problem will be solved by hosts refusing to do business with egregrious spammers.
My feeling is that the internet as a whole is going to evolve towards a trusted/untrusted scenario. Big vendors like AOL and MSN will be "in the club", so to speak -- their mail systems will "trust" each other, and accept email at full speed.
Other systems, particularly those connecting for the first time, will be untrusted. Those systems will be severly limited in the number of emails that will be accepted. A Bayesian filter can be applied to the email coming in from any new connection. The filter doesn't stop the email; rather, it builds an approximation of how much spam is coming in over that particular connection. The odd false positive isn't going to hurt, that way.
As the system gains trust, which can happen only by having time elapse and by having a low spam percentage, trust will gradually accrue, and email traffic will be permitted to have progressively higher volumes.
The beauty of this situation is that you still accept email from just about anywhere, but you don't _trust_ that source, until that source proves itself.
It doesn't take very much to implement a solution like this. Any organization that failed to implement it or have a strong anti-spam policy would find itself being on a lot of untrusted lists, and unable to send very much email. Simply being a transfer point for spam will also get you untrusted, which means that you'll have to pay attention.
I could care less about spam. I recently installed SpamBayes in my Outlook (it doesn't work with Outlook Express) and spam has ceased to be a problem. Where before I used to get 30 to 40 spams a day, I now see only one every other day. And the way this FREE software works, the more I get, the smarter it becomes. I rarely get a false positive. Spam me all you want, I could care less.
Ted, I use SpamBayes too. It does a fantastic job. The reason you are so enthusiastic about it is:
1. You know about it. Not many people do.
2. You don't pay the costs of Spam. There are hundreds of millions of $$ (or possibly more) being spent to deal with this thing.
Did you know that almost 90% of the spam on the internet is eliminated before it reaches its target? There are clever people out there doing clever things, like removing known spammers machines. Your 30 or 40 a day is only about 10% of what you'd be getting if these people weren't doing their work.
There are serious dollars involved.
Ted:
It's very nice that you, personally, are not bothered by spam. It's a pity that the tremendous amounts of bandwidth wasted by millions of spam-mails sent every day isn't arrested by your software...
:)
I do hope giveing the feds time and patience we will see some much needed improvements. I am going to look into SpamBayers.
Steven den Beste's top post right now concerns some spam filtering software ideas that seem to work remarkably well. His conclusion is that anti-spam legislation may not even be necessary, since Bayesian filtering will spell the end of spammers entirely. RTWT, of course, but his conclusions are very encouraging.
Dean
You have the last word so a forum like this is really a skewed opinion so let me start out by saying that I find it extremely amusing that the top of your website contains the following statement: "Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy".
I would think that a true “liberal” would understand the reason free speech is so important…mostly because self righteous people like yourself who seem to enjoy telling others what they should and should not say and how they should say it. The slope is extremely slippery and once you start regulating one “objectionable” portion of speech you start down the slope, speeding up as you travel further and further down to total censorship. Go to China and see how they solve the Spam issue in Beijing. The internet is blocked, simple solution.
You seem so intent on extolling the dramatic costs of Spam on businesses without once balancing your opinion with the revenue businesses generate from this advertising medium. Do you mean to imply that the costs far out weigh the benefits to businesses? Small business owner especially benefit from Email advertising because they do not have the deep pockets that large corporations do for more traditional national advertising campaigns. Nor do you explore the reduced prices that increased competition provides for consumers. My guess is that the value generated for the economy dwarf the costs.
I would also like to compare “traditional” junk mail with Spam. Imagine my surprise while snow blowing my driveway when a “legitimate” advertising newspaper buried under the snow was sucked into the machine, quickly destroying it…$800 in damage from one “free” newspaper. I never asked for it, never read it, but there it was. Should these newspapers now be banned?
I pay for my trash to be removed weekly and part of that trash is “junk mail”. I never asked for it, never read it, but I have to pay to dispose of it each week. Add this expense to the social cost of deforestation, air pollution and water pollution, health maladies and landfill costs and the costs quickly dwarf the Spam problem. Should all “junk mail” now be banned? Should junk mail be banned if a recipient receives one letter daily? What about 10 daily? What about 1,000 daily? Which “liberal” should decide the limit?
The slippery slope is easy to go down and difficult to climb back up. So before you start banning things, you should look at all angles to see which domino will fall next. While I am 100% opposed to the Nazis organizations, I am 100% in favor of their right to exist without persecution for their beliefs. This might not be your “liberal” interpretation of freedom but it is mine.
The truth of the matter is that the new legislation does nothing to regulate the use of anonymous remailer services that operate out of foreign countries and allow subscribers to mask their true identities. Not only are these servicers used by advertisers to send spam anonymously (there's no way to trace it), but they are also used by wackos to send anonymous harrassing emails. That is one issue, I would like to see politicians address, the use of the internet to harrass, stalk, annoy other individuals. Spam, yes is a problem. Internet stalking is another one that has not been dealt with effectively by state legistlators, and not at all, at the federal level.
The truth of the matter is that the new legislation does nothing to regulate the use of anonymous remailer services that operate out of foreign countries and allow subscribers to mask their true identities. Not only are these servicers used by advertisers to send spam anonymously (there's no way to trace it), but they are also used by wackos to send anonymous harrassing emails. That is one issue, I would like to see politicians address, the use of the internet to harrass, stalk, annoy other individuals. Spam, yes is a problem. Internet stalking is another one that has not been dealt with effectively by state legistlators, and not at all, at the federal level.
As an I.S. Manager and an employee in a small business (75 employees), this is my take on Spam.
Spam costs small business owners money. It costs LOTS of money. The added load on the network, the wasted employee hours, the software that must be purchased to filter it out, all of these things decrease what goes to the bottom line at the end of each month. And God forbid that one of the girls in the office gets upset and decides to sue the company because the penis enlargment offers in her inbox every day are creating a hostile work enviorment and she and her lawyer think the company didn't do enough to protect her.
The simple fact is Spam costs everyone money except for the spammers.
And I strongly believe it's already illegal. All of the courts need to do is enforce existing laws.
Huh? How could that be? Here's how.
My e-mail address is a computer program. It runs inside of other programs (just as Excel runs inside of Windows and custom made spreadsheets run inside of Excel) and delivers e-mail to me. That e-mail address is unique in all the world. I selected EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER that makes up my e-mail address. I created that address and own it in exactly the same sense that Microsoft wrote and owns Microsoft Excel.
The use of my private, intellectual property without my consent for commercial purposes is already illegal. That e-mail address is my private, intellectual property. Suppose I post a license agreement on my web page stating that use of my e-mail address is strictly regulated by the license, that use constitutes acceptance of the terms of the agreement, and that each use of my private e-mail address requires a payment of $500 in US funds. Why isn't that as valid as a Microsft shrink warp license agreement?
Something to think about.
While looking at SpamBayes, I found a commercial version named InBoxer at http://www.inboxer.com. It is free for 21 days, but costs $25 after that. It comes with an installer and technical support.