In the movie Airplane!, a visitor to a suburban house is progressively mauled by the resident dog. The lady of the house repeatedly, but rather absently, scolds the dog, even as it continues its attack. “Shep! Bad dog!”
Congress, responding to the loud bone-crunching sounds coming from constituents overwhelmed by spam, is busy doing its own ineffectual scolding, having finally passed the CAN-SPAM Act. The bill, which Dubya says he will sign, stands for “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing” — even though it does little of either.
Basically under the law, e-mailers are prevented from forging e-mail headers, and sending unsoliced porographic ads. Marketers need to include a return e-mail address or link to a web form to allow unsubscribes from the list.
How is this pointless? Let me count the ways …
First off, it only has an impact on US spammers. The answer will be that those who are not hosting their spam servers inside the US (or who are not US companies) will be effectively immune.
The most egregious spammers, the ones already peddling porn and quack medicines, are already subject to existing laws. If they’re not worried about being prosecuted for selling bogus erection medicine and dangly-bit enlargers, they’re not going to worry about being prosecuted for forging mail headers — especially since that will make it harder to get hold of them, with a maximum penalty of, in the most egregious circumstances, 5 years in prison if they are caught, and assuming anything but the most desultory enforcement takes place.
The law requires an “opt-out,” which means that the vendor — not the spammer — must give you an opportunity to tell them you no longer want to receive their e-mails … for a given product, or, maybe vendor. Well, la-de-dah. Legit vendors already do this (since they definitely don’t want to irritate their potential customers). Spammers don’t do it now, and even if they decide to comply, creating an infinite number of mailing lists is trivial.
“You’ve chosen to opt out of the Manly Man Eyebrow Plucker v1.3 (SKU 134965) Mailing List. Thank you for verifying this is a legitimate address. You will begin to receive multiple e-mails from us for our other 95,000 products (constantly being renamed and reidentified), as well as from this spammer for other vendors’ goods. Have a nice day!”
And, finally, the law preempts stricter state laws. Not that those laws have been any more effective (see above), but California’s opt-in legal requirement is now null and void. Direct Marketers really like that.
In other words, don’t deinstall that anti-spam software any time soon.