ZDNet AnchorDesk: How to stop spam? Don't look to legislation:
"After months of debate, Congress has approved an antispam bill, known as the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, or the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. President Bush has indicated he will sign it before the end of the year. That sounds like good news for anyone who uses e-mail. But once you look beyond the spin, you'll find there's much less here than meets the eye. "

IN A NUTSHELL, CAN-SPAM prohibits the use of fraudulent e-mail headers, the use of robotic means to collect e-mail addresses from Web sites, and the sending of unsolicited adult advertising. It requires e-mail marketers to provide a working URL in messages so recipients can remove themselves from any future mailings.

Down the road, the law also calls for the creation of a federal Do Not Spam list, much like the FTC's Do Not Call list, which gives you the ability to remove your phone number from telemarketers' databases. The law also prohibits unwanted commercial messages via mobile services on mobile phones and PDAs.…

SO WHY DID the attorneys general from California, Kansas, Maryland, Nevada, Texas, Vermont, and Washington urge the House of Representatives to vote against the act? Because CAN-SPAM ignores and supercedes any existing or pending junk e-mail laws in 30 states--including the toughest, California's--with a decidedly weaker federal law.

The state laws, which are now obsolete, were more stringent than the federal one in several ways. For example, the laws in Utah and California would allow recipients to sue spammers who use false e-mail headers. One provision of a California law would even use the penalties claimed from such cases to help fund the state's high-tech crime task forces. However, under CAN-SPAM, while recipients can still sue spammers, the burden of proof has been extended beyond showing that the e-mail header was false and now requires that plaintiffs show the sender also knew it was false.

It's the opinion of several state attorneys general that this is a much higher standard of proof than other consumer protection laws, and that spam recipients will now tie up the legal system with new cases without being able to stop unsolicited e-mails in the meantime. That is what the direct-marketing associations wanted: judicial gridlock.

ANOTHER SHORTCOMING of the law: According to Spamhaus.org, an antispam clearinghouse, CAN-SPAM allows 23 million U.S. businesses to spam U.S. e-mail addresses legally as long as they also provide a means for users to opt-out of future mailings.

It turns out the direct marketers got their way this time around. With telemarketing restricted by the Do Not Call list, direct-marketing associations now see e-mail advertising as their last and best option, since automatically sending hundreds of thousands of e-mails is much cheaper than maintaining call centers. These groups made the rounds in Washington D.C. and managed to get this muted federal antispam bill passed quickly. For the legislators in Congress, CAN-SPAM allows them to say, "Look, we did something about spam," when, in reality, the act does little to actually solve the problem.…

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