Offensive Offers

Can We Ever Really Can Spam? PC Magazine, May, 2003 by Lance Ulanoff

CAN SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) is an awfully catchy name for a bill. I suspect that Senator Conrad R. Burns (R–MT) and Senator Ron Wyden (D–OR) conferred with some marketing execs to craft that one. The bill is intended to stem the flow of spam onto our desktops, but I have to wonder if it will, like many other federal-government attempts to rein in the Internet, backfire or simply wither away.

There's no question that spam is a huge problem, and an entire industry has sprung up to combat it. Spam-control tools vary from free applications like Spamgourmet to commercial programs like Junk Spy and simple tools built into our favorite e-mail applications. I understand why the government feels the need to police this problem. Those running the country know that most of us are out of our minds with anger over spam. Even when we use tools to control junk mail, our mailboxes still fill with garbage. Many prominent Web destinations like Yahoo! host free e-mail accounts, and a number of those site operators are also backing this bill for the same reason as the legislators, I assume: People (read customers and constituents) are complaining.

Most of my e-mail accounts are cursed—my office Microsoft Outlook mail, my Hotmail, my Outlook Express home account, and other various free accounts, including one with Yahoo!. All of them, to varying degrees, receive spam. Sometimes I know why I'm getting it; I signed up for something and stupidly forgot to opt out or actually opted in thinking I would appreciate an occasional offer from a trusted source. Unfortunately, once I opened that door, less trusted sources crept in. I am confounded, though, by how I get some of what I receive, especially with accounts I use to correspond with friends and coworkers only.

As a PC Magazine editor, I'm lucky enough to have come across many of the strategies for eliminating junk mail. They range from simple self-applied e-mail filters to applications that catch and eradicate spam. Recently, our company applied a spam blocker to our corporate e-mail accounts. Although our spam levels quickly dropped to near zero, the solution wasn't the most intelligent, and many important e-mails—from newsgroups, for example—also bounced.

This is one of the problems I have with the CAN SPAM bill. I fear it will end up hurting legitimate businesses far more than illegitimate ones. Aboveboard enterprises use bulk e-mail to contact customers. It's a cost-efficient and an important business tool. Look at what you get in your regular, physical mailbox (the one outside your house or apartment). It's filled with bulk mail. Some is useless and annoying, but other pieces are valuable—those department store coupons offering one-day, 15 percent discounts, for example. Many rules and regulations apply to snail mail, yet they manage to leave the door open for legitimate unsolicited mail. One of the key differences between physical bulk mail and the electronic version is that pornographic e-mail comes right alongside the innocuous life insurance offers. I would have to agree with legislators and others that this is just plain unacceptable. It's analogous to a Penthouse Magazine flyer (complete with graphic images) showing up, unsolicited, on your doorstep. Mailing laws prevent that from happening.

So if postal mail laws work so well to control the kind of physical bulk mail you receive, why can't the US government apply the same template to spam? I'm not sure it can't, but CAN SPAM does not appear to fit that template. Sure, it says all the right things: "(1) there is a substantial government interest in regulation of unsolicited commercial electronic mail [spam]; (2) senders of [spam] should not mislead recipients as to the source or content of such mail; and (3) recipients of [spam] have a right to decline to receive additional [spam] from the same source."

The bill seems focused primarily on misleading information, possibly to position spam as fraud and allow perpetrators to be federally prosecuted. But is spam really misleading? I happen to believe it comes with enough red flags to make even inexperienced e-mail users take notice. For example, most porn e-mail clearly states in the subject line what you're going to see (e-mails that don't have obvious come-ons like "Hey, baby" or "My new cam"). There's no fraud, just the potential for offensive content. The subject lines of other junk e-mails (insurance offers, promises to improve your lifestyle, and the like) are a bit more opaque, of course. But there are other clues. None of the spam I receive ever comes from someone I know (unless it's a virus sent unwittingly), for example.

Identifying spam is really quite easy—the senders are unknown and the subjects are typically short like, "Hey You"—but keeping it out of your mailbox is another matter entirely. Still, the CAN-SPAM bill gets this part wrong, too. The bill states that there must be a "return address or comparable mechanism in unsolicited commercial electronic mail." Most junk e-mail does have a return address, information for opting out, or both. Unfortunately, the info is almost never valid, and following the opt-out procedure usually cements your status as a real e-mail target. (Oddly, the bill appears to cover the same ground twice a little further on.)