A man from Nigeria wants assistance in managing millions of dollars. A private business has just the gadgets to improve your physique. And an unknown airline wants to sell you a ticket to paradise.
Sound familiar? It should.
These are examples of unsolicited or “spam” e-mails which have flooded the inboxes of millions of Internet users and the federal government is trying to beat the spam by introducing legislation that would stop or limit businesses from sending unwanted e-mails.
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The change would ultimately alter the way businesses – including legitimate ones – send e-mail to users.
Two bills have been introduced on the federal level, one in the U.S. House of Representatives and one in the Senate.
The House bill, introduced last month and dubbed the RID SPAM Act of 2003, would enable consumers to opt out of all commercial e-mail and would prohibit people from sending fraudulent spam. The legislation, if passed, would also provide Internet service providers (ISPs), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice with the criminal and civil tools needed to enforce computer fraud.
A third provision of the legislation would force companies to include an identification of the e-mail in the subject line. For example, an e-mail that is an advertisement would describe the e-mail as such.
Lastly, the legislation would make it unlawful to collect addresses from a Web site and send spam to unsuspecting e-mail addresses.
“This tough anti-spam legislation targets egregious e-mail abusers who disrupt businesses and harass individuals,” James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Those who falsify their e-mail identity, send sexually explicit e-mail to unsuspecting individuals and use e-mail as a weapon will be punished severely with criminal penalties under this legislation.”
The FTC has testified to Congress on the need for such legislation.
Commissioners said there are two basic problems with “unsolicited commercial e-mail” or UCE (another term for spam).
First, they say, most spam e-mail include some type of deception and fraud. Second, because spam is flooding Internet users’ inboxes, it may lead to disruptions in the efficiency of Internet services.
For U.S.-based ISPs, 30 percent of inbound e-mail is spam, while at U.S.-based corporate organizations, spam accounts for 15 to 20 percent of inbound e-mail, according to a report by Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based research company.
America Online alone reported recently that it blocked 2.37 billion pieces of spam in a single day, according to the FTC’s testimony.
Aside from the problem in e-mail traffic, there is a huge expense associated with spam.
Spam will cost U.S. organizations more than $10 billion in 2003, according to the Ferris report, which also states that spam causes U.S. businesses $4 billion in lost productivity each year. And $3.7 billion will be spent by businesses that have to buy more powerful servers and more bandwidth to deal with the issue.
Good spam vs. bad spam
The Network Advertising Initiative, a group that recently launched the E-mail Service Providers Coalition, a group that represents more than 40 e-mail service providers throughout the nation, formed its coalition nine months ago to have its say in the spam debate.
“The primary purpose for this group to come together was to provide balance to the spam debate — it was a bipolar debate,” said Trevor Hughes, executive director of the NAI. “It was the big guys against the spammers. As a result, they were coming up with solutions that were – in a sense – throwing the baby out with the bath water.”
NAI members and legitimate businesses that send newsletters or coupons to their consumers have unfairly fallen into the spam category.
“It could be a newsletter, a multi-national consumer products retailer, local bakery or your local little league” that are affected by this legislation, he said.
Ultimately, groups and businesses would be affected by the change because they would have to incur an increase in cost and would be subject to new compliance rules.
“Let’s not create something that makes businesses a target because they are sending e-mail,” said Gail Goodman, chief executive officer of Roving Software, a Massachusetts provider of e-mail marketing software.
Roving sends e-mailed coupons, promotions and announcements to lists of customers that include the U.S. Tennis Association and the Boston Public Library. Roving also provides its software to channel partners including Staples.com and Pitney Bowes who then market the service to its small-business customers.
If the legislation passes, it may force businesses to either rebuild their e-mail lists or would open them up to what some describe as “frivolous lawsuits.”
With the new legislation, companies would have to have documented consent from every person to whom they send e-mail.
“If you are a small business and have been in business for 10 years and have been collecting e-mails for the last four or five years, you’ve spent a lot of time creating a list (of e-mails),”Goodman said. “And if federal legislation passes that says you need a higher consent model, your choice now is to throw out this asset that you’ve spent years developing or run the risk of not being able to document where you got the e-mail address and be at risk of (lawsuits).”
States or the federal government
More than half of the 50 states have introduced their own computer crime or anti-spam laws.
In 1999, Rhode Island passed a law that would make it unlawful for a person to forge e-mail header information for the purpose of sending unsolicited bulk e-mail. The penalty for breaking this law comes with a $5,000 price tag and may include up to five years in jail.
Rhode Island law also states that no commercial e-mail message from a computer in Rhode Island can be sent to a Rhode Island resident unless the entity or person has a toll-free telephone number that the user can call to notify the sender to stop sending e-mail. Kansas also makes it mandatory for businesses to have a toll-free number.
In Massachusetts, legislators are trying to push three separate anti-spam bills. The bills would force senders to include key words (called labels or tags) in the subject line such as ADV for advertisement or ADLT for adult e-mail.
Although some states acted quickly and passed laws against spamming, some in the industry say the laws would be redundant if the federal bills are passed.
States had no other choice because “there was concern that the federal government had not acted yet and states had a compelling need to act quickly,” said Hughes.
Members of the NAI are hoping for a federal law versus having to deal with individual state laws that would be confusing to comply with because there are 33 states with spam legislation that are inconsistent with each other.
“From a legislative perspective, we are very, very supportive of federal legislation,” Hughes said. “If there ever was a medium that demanded federal legislation – it’s e-mail.”
If the federal legislation did not pass and states continued to make their own laws governing spam, companies would have to know where each person they e-mail lives to be sure they are complying with the individual’s state spam laws.
“I think it is imperative that we see preemptive federal legislation,” Goodman added.
Fighting back
Still, the FTC said there is no “silver bullet” to stopping spam.
To fight against deceptive spam, the commission has brought more than 50 cases against organizations that were found to have deceptive e-mail practices. The FTC has also brought cases against groups that fail to honor a “remove me” request from users.
Earlier this month, in a prepared testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the FTC told Congress that it needed additional authority to fight spam. In its plea to Congress, commissioners said they need a way to investigate those sending the e-mail and more room to investigate spammers across borders.
That, by far, is the most significant part of the legislation, says NAI’s Hughes.
Enforcement would allow both the FTC and other organizations, including ISPs and state attorneys general to enforce the legislation.
“That is absolutely the most important thing for us right now,” Hughes said. “We need enforcement.”
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