Antispam Law's Effectiveness Doubted

WASHINGTON -- An antispam bill that was poised to become law in the new year may do little to stem the barrage of junk e-mail, according to corporate information and technology officers who deal with the problem daily.

The legislation, called the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act, was signed into law by President George W. Bush earlier in December.

It requires senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail to let recipients opt out of future mailings, sets penalties for sending deceptive messages, and begins the process of creating a national Do Not Spam list. The measure requires all e-mail advertising--not just unsolicited messages--to include a valid reply-to address, a valid postal address, and accurate headers and subject lines.

Concerns Remain

But CIOs say it won't work, since so much spam comes from outside the United States.

Tod Ferran, CIO of Riverton Motor, an auto dealership based in Sandy, Utah, says you'd need "the authority of a world government" to enforce such a law. Instead, he favors a technological solution. The open-source Mozilla e-mail system he uses includes a junk e-mail filtering feature, he notes. He also recommends "education of the public" to not respond to spam solicitations.

Matt Kesner, chief technology officer of the Fenwick & West law firm based in Mountain View, California, says he thinks legislating against spam is worth a try. Still, he questions why Congress would pass a bill that would trump a strong new California antispam law.

That measure, passed in September but overruled by the federal law, would have required marketers to get permission from or have an existing business relationship with a recipient before sending e-mail. Without better technological and legal solutions, Kesner says he's afraid "we'll get to the point where we accept e-mail only from people we know."