Spam Not Completely Canned

The law that President Bush signed on Dec. 16 was officially named "Controlling the Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003," but most legislators refer to it as the "Can Spam Act."

The new law will probably put a dent in the amount of spam we receive, but, unfortunately, it won't can it altogether.

To begin with, it doesn't outlaw all forms of unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Companies can still send you mail - even if you don't ask for it - but they have to stop sending it if you so request. They also have to avoid using "false headers" such as fake return addresses. And if they send out sexually explicit mail, they have to appropriately label any mail containing "sexually oriented material." It also authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to create a "do not spam list," similar to the "do not call" list that prevents telemarketing companies from telephoning you.

The federal law also supersedes existing and proposed state laws, which pretty much wipes out California's recently enacted "Restrictions on Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Advertisers" law that is considerably tougher than the federal legislation. Like some other states, the California law would prohibit all unsolicited commercial e-mail and would allow Californians to sue people who violate the law.

The federal law is, of course, very well-intentioned. Lawmakers want to put an end to the most egregious spam, which often contains fraudulent advertisements and claims and sometimes brings unwanted pornography directly into our e-mail boxes.

As a parent, I'm more than a little angry at people who send sexually explicit spam to children. I'm a strong believer in the First Amendment, but there's a difference between exercising your right to publish sexually explicit material for adults versus pandering the material to children who aren't even looking for it.

Some anti-spam activists are upset the law doesn't ban all forms of unsolicited advertising, arguing that consumers should have the right to a spam-free mailbox unless they specifically "opt in" to receive e-mail from a business.

The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (www.cauce.org ) says that it is "disappointed by the enactment of a weak anti-spam law," arguing that this law "gives each marketer in the United States one free shot at each consumer's e-mail inbox," and claiming that the law is "crippled by limiting enforcement to overworked regulatory and law enforcement agencies, rather than giving consumers legal tools with which to protect their own inboxes." In other words, it doesn't give consumers the right to sue spammers.

My biggest concern about this and just about any law is that it will be hard to enforce. I'm sure that it will have some impact on spam but I'm not expecting a spam-free mailbox on Jan. 1 when the law takes effect.

What I expect instead is a continued flood of junk mail, with an increasing amount coming from overseas where spammers are pretty much outside the not-very-long arm of United States law.

Try as it might, the federal government can do only so much to protect people in cyberspace, so this is one case where consumers are going to have to take measures to protect themselves.

The good news is there are tools available that can cut down on spam.

A number of software companies, for example, offer anti-spam filtering programs that are reasonably good at getting rid of most, but not all unsolicited e-mail. I've had very good luck with Matador, a $29.95 program from MailFrontier (www.mailfrontier.com ).

This program, which you install on Windows computers running Outlook or Outlook Express, filters out your spam from your legitimate mail and puts the suspected junk mail into a separate folder. You can then look through that folder to make sure there aren't any false positives (legitimate mail that it thought was spam) and, if so, you can easily add that mailer to a "white list" so all future e-mail will go into your regular mail box.

A somewhat similar program, SpamNet, from Cloudmark (www.cloudmark.com ) also does a good job. Free trial versions of both programs are available from their web sites.

The newest version of Microsoft Outlook (which comes with Microsoft Office 2003) has a built-in spam filter. It's reasonably good, but not quite as effective as Matador or SpamNet.

Some Internet service providers offer "server side filtering," which has the advantage of keeping the mail from reaching you at all, which speeds things up when you download mail. The problem is that it's harder to check for false positives. In most cases, you can do that from the company's web site, but it's a relatively slow process.

One way to get rid of virtually all junk e-mail is to use a challenge-and-response system that requires senders to answer a simple question that any person could answer before it will deliver their mail to you.

The reason for this is simple. Almost all spam is sent to e-mail addresses that have been "harvested" from web sites, chat rooms and other public places or from lists that the spammer purchases from businesses that support spam. The spam is almost always generated electronically with no human intervention - that's one of the things that makes it so cheap to send. So, by requiring human intervention, these systems pretty much eliminate all spam.

MailBlocks is a web-based mail service that uses this approach, but to make things a bit easier, the service first checks to see if the sender is in your address book before it sends a challenge. If the person is in your list, it assumes they're OK and sends the mail. Otherwise it sends a challenge. The service costs $9.95 a year, which is a good deal considering that it's also an e-mail service that's easy to use from any web site.

Earthlink, a major Internet service provider, offers an optional challenge response system for its customers.

Challenge response is extremely effective, but it does have one drawback. It means that people who write to you have to go through the steps for responding to the challenge. It's fine for people who mainly correspond with family and close friends and a great idea for kids but not for people whose business requires them to interact with the public. I don't use such a system, for example, because I don't want to make it harder for readers to contact me.

By Larry Magid