Canning the spam.

Byline: The Register-Guard

If you're like most Americans who use computers to communicate, your daily e-mail fare includes offers to enlarge various body parts, to lose up to 200 pounds, to work at home and become part of a $450 billion industry, and to watch naked people engaged in an astonishingly wide range of naked acts.

For most folks, such commercial e-mail, or "spam," long ago lost whatever novelty value it once had and is a nuisance that threatens to wear out the delete key on their computers. So it comes as hopeful news that Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers is proposing a law that would give computer users the option of blocking all unsolicited junk e-mail.

Under the proposal, a similar version of which is being proposed by Myers' counterpart in Missouri, senders who violate the no-spam law would face fines. The rules would apply regardless of where the offending e-mail originated, even if it's out-of-state. As a result, the bill would affect e-marketers nationwide, since they are unable to distinguish geographic destinations from e-mail addresses.

Roughly half the states already have enacted anti-spam laws, but Oregon's and Missouri's would be unique. The standard approach elsewhere has been to require commercial e-mailers to be truthful in subject lines, to put valid return addresses on letters and to honor requests to stop sending mail to those many souls who want nothing to do with it.

The Oregon and Missouri proposals would instead take an "opt-out" approach: Consumers seeking to rid themselves of spam would file with the state and, in Oregon, pay a small fee for registering their e-mail addresses. E-mail marketers would have to obtain the state's "opt-out" list and adjust their own mailing lists accordingly.

By filing with the state, computer users in Oregon could expect to see one-third less volume in e-mail traffic - that's the estimated percentage of spam e-mail traffic on the Internet. First Amendment rights don't appear to be an issue; anyone who wants this stuff could still get it, and it's the consumer's choice whether to open - or close - the sluice gate through which it flows.

However, the approach could pose some enforcement challenges. While it may not be difficult to nail an offending spammer who operates out of Southern California, it could be impossible - or impractical - to do the same to a commercial marketer operating out of the Dominican Republic.

An alternative approach, one already in place in the European Union, is an "opt-in" law, one that bars unsolicited commercial e-mail unless a consumer has specifically requested it. The "opt-in" approach, however, might pose some First Amendment difficulties. It raises the question of whether a state - or a nation, for that matter - is able to pass a law barring an enterprise from contacting all but what presumably would be a small percentage of its population.

For now, the Oregon-Missouri approach seems like a worthwhile experiment that could help unclog the in-boxes of our busy lives. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to go check our e-mail ...