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Congress crowed about cleaning up our in-boxes with the passage of an antispam law last year, but brace yourself: Some of this year's unsolicited e-mail may feature the latest news from your congressional representatives.
Since existing laws don't address recent technological advances such as spam, the company had turned to older laws referring to trespass of goods and nuisance laws to counter the menace of junk e-mails.
The European Privacy and Communications Directive came into effect on 11 December, but in the same month the UK became one of the worst offenders for sending unsolicited email, according to rankings compiled by anti-spam organisation Spamhaus.
The US Can Spam Act became law on 1 January, but US email security company Postini saw the proportion of spam rise from 74 per cent in December to 84 per cent within the first couple of days of the new year.
This article takes a head-in-the-sand approach to email marketing and, in spite of the title, does not address "spam issues" at all! For instance:
Marketers are beginning to discover that fully outsourced providers can be a cost-effective way to establish an intelligent and optimized e-mail marketing program as well—allowing them to avoid hardware, software, bandwidth, and staffing costs while reducing the operational burden on a corporate IT department.
The author does not bother to mention that many of these "fully outsourced providers" are out-and-out spammers-for-hire who use every trick in the book—and leave the hiring (legitimate) company smelling like they've been shoveling manure. A few consumer warnings and guidelines would have been in order!
A: Yeah, it sounds good. But think about it. As long as a spammer follows these rules, there's no stopping him. You could, theoretically, get an unsolicited e-mail from every one of the 24 million small businesses in America. As John Mozena of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail likes to point out, even if just 1 percent of those businesses sent you an e-mail this year, you'd get 657 messages every day.
Q: Whew. And they'd all be legal?
A: Yep. And if you're not feeling sick yet, consider this: Even the illegal spam might not disappear.
The principal authors of the new law - Senator Conrad Burns, a Republican from Montana, and Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat - wrote to Timothy J. Muris, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, asking that cases be brought against spam kingpins this week. But officials at the commission said that bringing actions that quickly was nearly impossible. After all, those who violate the law do so by hiding their identities and it takes time and skilled computer detective work to track them down and build a case.
Not content with merely adding new spam-filtering capabilities to its e-mail software, in the coming year Microsoft also intends to track down and take legal action against spammers, no matter where in the world the junk mailers are located.
