It won’t solve the spam issue overnight, but the Senate’s Can Spam Act is a significant first step toward an effective national system to keep legitimate e-mail flowing while stemming spam, direct marketers say. It sets strict rules for what constitutes legitimate e-mail, grants federal and state officials more leeway in enforcing them and subjects lawbreakers to a penalty of up to five years in prison.
“With this bill, we’re drawing a bright line between what’s legitimate commercial e-mail and what’s spam,” says a spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association.
The rules state, for example, that a commercial e-mail message must have a subject line directly related to the message so as not to mislead the recipient and that it must include the street address of the sender in the body of the message. “If you send an e-mail that is falsified with a misleading subject line, or don’t include the street address, then it’s spam,” the spokesman says. “It’s a black-and-white issue. The legislation doesn’t allow for arguments over the intent of the sender.”
But the Senate measure still has a ways to go to be effective, experts say. “This legislation in itself will not end spam, but it will be one piece of the puzzle,” says Al DiGuido, CEO of e-mail marketing firm Bigfoot Interactive. Other pieces of the puzzle, he adds, are still under development and include an effective means of labeling legitimate e-mail and a technological solution--which he compares to a “digital postage stamp”--to identifying legitimate e-mail.
Some direct marketers say that one of the major strengths of the bill, which was passed by the Senate on Oct. 22, is that it would override a slew of state anti-spam legislation with numerous rules that are difficult for marketers to comply with. “The current patchwork of disparate state laws has become a punishing compliance challenge for law-abiding marketers while doing nothing to reduce the amount of spam in consumers’ in-boxes,” says H. Robert Wientzen, president and CEO of the DMA. The Can Spam Act was introduced by Senators Conrad Burns (R, MT) and Ron Wyden (D, OR). There is no identical bill in the House of Representatives, where several anti-spam bills have been proposed. Washington observers say the leading House bill is one introduced by Rep. Billy Tauzin (R., LA).
Wyden’s office notes that more than 13 billion spam e-mail messages are sent each day worldwide, and that the cost of dealing with spam, including anti-spam equipment and lost productivity, amounts to about $10 billion every year in the U.S. alone.
The DMA and others oppose a provision in the Senate bill that requires the Federal Trade Commission to report within 18 months on the feasibility of a national “Do Not E-Mail” list. The bill also calls on the FTC to recommend a method of administering a Do Not E-Mail list whether or not it considers it feasible.
In addition, the bill calls on the FTC to report on the feasibility of administering a system of labeling commercial e-mail, such as with the prefix “ADVT.”
The DMA and others say they doubt that either the Do Not E-Mail list or labeling measure would be effective in curtailing spam. Consumers change their e-mail addresses too frequently to make a Do Not E-Mail list feasible, the DMA says. It adds that putting labels such as “ADVT” on commercial e-mail would make it easy for consumers to configure their e-mail filters to block all ADVT-labeled messages, while unlabeled spam would still get delivered.
Still, bill proponents say they’re hopeful. “This bill was never presumed to be the be-all and end-all to stop spam,” the DMA spokesman says. But combined with other efforts, including a list of authentic e-mail marketers being compiled by Internet service providers, a final law based on the Senate bill should go a long way toward controlling spam, he adds.
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