Law aims to zap e-mail spam.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

You might not know it from looking at your in-box, but today is the day that beleaguered e-mailers get their long-sought relief from the daily onslaught of spam.

A new federal law, known as the CAN SPAM Act of 2003, takes effect today. It doesn't make spam illegal and it doesn't make your electronic mailbox off-limits until after you've been spammed, but it does put some teeth in the laws governing commercial e-mail that backers believe will end spamming as we know it.

Privacy hard-liners, though, call the law feeble and destined for failure. Some even fear a whole new tide of junk e-mail from more mainstream businesses emboldened by the clarity the law brings to the spamming trade.

But if the law works as intended, it will make it easy for you and your Internet provider to identify junk e-mail and block it, if you choose.

It also will make it easy to get off mailing lists and will strip away the technological veil that spammers use to hide their identities.

The key to making it work is tough penalties for outlaw spammers who ignore the new rules, which include an "opt out" provision that gives spam recipients an easy way to be removed from the sender's list. The rules also require accurate subject lines and "clear and conspicuous" notice that the message is an ad.

Fines in the millions of dollars, forfeiture of computer equipment and prison time await those caught flouting the law.

Backers say the law strikes a proper balance between free speech and privacy rights. And, they say, it gives prosecutors a needed hammer to bring down unscrupulous spam barons who flood the Internet with get-rich schemes, unwanted sales pitches and outright scams.

"What I've always felt is there is a First Amendment right to communicate," said U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, one of the bill's co-authors. "But there is also a First Amendment right and a right of consumers to say, 'I've had it. Stop sending me this garbage.' '

Billions of pieces of spam a day

That's just what consumers have been saying for years, almost since the first electronic entrepreneur first realized there was a buck to be made peddling computer gizmos, vacation time-shares, cheap mortgages and, inevitably, pornography to unsuspecting computer users. The resulting deluge of unsolicited commercial bulk e-mail came to be known as junk e-mail or spam and now is sent out at the rate of billions of pieces a day.

CAN SPAM is the government's first attempt at reining in the marketing free-for-all. The acronym stands for the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act and was signed into law last month by President Bush.

Locally, Internet service providers say the new law is at least a good start.

"We welcome it because spam is a huge problem for ISPs," said Steven Johnson, director of marketing for Corvallis-based Peak Internet, which recently acquired DNC Internet in Eugene. He estimated that at least half of the e-mail traffic his company handles is spam.

"I think it's a difficult task to legislate a solution here, but it's important to have the legal teeth to go after the worst offenders," he said. "Now our legal institutions can go after spammers and create examples, and that in time will send a message to those who are operating on the periphery."

Anything that reduces the torrent of unwanted e-mail is good news to Monica Coleman, director of The Web Zone, an Internet cafe and service provider in Eugene's Fifth Street Public Market. She knows the plague of spam as well as anyone: When she got to work on Monday, she had 1,600 e-mail messages and about 90 percent were spam.

"It's ungodly how much spam we get," she said. "It's just ridiculous."

A waste of time and energy

Internet providers estimate that half or more of all e-mail traffic is spam. At The Web Zone, 2.5 million messages a week are sent to invalid addresses alone by spammers who send out millions of messages a day using randomly assigned strings of letters and words in an effort to ferret out valid e-mail addresses.

Coleman spends two hours out of an 11-hour day going through her own e-mail to get rid of spam, which is at the far end of the scale. How much spam people get depends on a number of factors, especially whether their e-mail address is posted publicly, such as on a company Web site, a computer bulletin board or anyplace else on the Web where it can be pasted onto a commercial e-mailer's list.

According to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the amount of time a person spends dealing with e-mail varies from minutes to a half-hour a day or more.

Forty percent of people get six to 30 e-mails a day, and anywhere from 20 percent to more than 60 percent of that is spam.

"One word would sum up my view of the problem: H-U-G-E," said Ray Cesaletti, an Internet sales and support representative at Eugene Free Network. "It sucks your energy. It takes time and it takes attention, which is then taken from other, more productive areas."

At the national and world levels, the impact of spam is staggering. Basex, a New York technology and research firm, released a report this week pegging the cost of spam to businesses alone at $20 billion a year, which works out to $600 to $1,000 per user per year in lost productivity, storage and transmission costs and other costs.

The problem is so big that Basex named spam its "product of the year." It wasn't meant as an honor but as an acknowledgment of the vast effect junk e-mail has on business.

"Given an environment where virtually anyone can purchase a list of 25 million e-mail addresses for $25 and send e-mail to all 25 million at practically no cost, it should come as no surprise that spam has become such a scourge," Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira wrote in the company's report.

Bringing a halt to something that big won't be easy. Even supporters of the new law acknowledge that the only way it will put a dent in spam is through tough, high-profile enforcement that sends a message to spammers that the cost of doing business illegally has gone way up.

`Kingpin spammers' targeted

Wyden, who co-sponsored the CAN SPAM Act with Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana, wrote to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Timothy Muris as soon as the president signed the bill, asking for swift action. He wants the agency to take aim at the worst offenders, a group of about 250 "kingpin spammers" who send out millions of unwanted e-mails a day.

"It goes into effect Jan. 1, and if I had my way, 20 minutes later they'd file the first suit," Wyden said. "What we want is for people to see these kingpin spammers are operating an outlaw industry, and for the first time there's going to be some consequences."

Wyden takes issue with critics of the bill, who complain that it allows marketers to send at least one e-mail ad before recipients have a chance to "opt out" of future mailings. They want a system that prohibits sending unsolicited commercial e-mail to anyone who hasn't expressly agreed to receive it, called "opt in."

"It still gives (spammers) the right to send out unsolicited messages to whoever they want as often as they want until they're asked to stop," said John Mozena, co-founder and vice president of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail. "We think that's a pretty fundamental flaw in the legislation."

To illustrate, he uses some simple math. There are roughly 23 million small businesses in America, and if a person received just one e-mail ad a year from just 1 percent of those businesses, it would amount to 630 messages a day.

Mozena said the new law may clean out some of the spam "bottom feeders," the ones offering bootleg Viagra or a share of some dead Nigerian dictator's loot, but he fears it also could attract far more new players.

That's because businesses that have been reluctant to have their names associated with spam may now find the market more palatable because they can send their pitches under the banner of "legal spam."

"To some extent, we're glad Congress has recognized this is an issue worthy of their attention," Mozena said. "We're just disappointed that after six years of waiting for an anti-spam law, the one we got isn't going to make a lot of difference."

Internet providers generally are a little more optimistic. Cesaletti said he noticed a small decrease in his own spam immediately after the new law was passed and hopes it at least slows the growth of spam so Internet providers don't have to keep spending money to keep up with it.

But like many people, Cesaletti thinks the final solution is an overhaul of e-mail technology itself. The system is designed to make activities such as spamming easy, and until that changes, it's going to be an uphill fight.

"My opinion for a long time is that if there is a solution, it's not here at the end of the chain where we receive unwanted e-mail. It's at the top of the chain," he said. "The manufacturers and designers of the technology need to get back to the drawing board."

WHAT YOU CAN DO

John Mozena, co-founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, advises people to take advantage of the new spam law immediately. That means:

If you get an e-mail ad and want to be removed from the sender's mailing list, go ahead and use the "remove me" option that's now required in all commercial e-mail, even though until now this was considered a mistake.

If you get any more e-mail from that sender, report it to your Internet service provider and the Federal Trade Commission. Forward the message to your ISP at its Internet address or the address it specifies for e-mail complaints (usually found on its home page); forward messages to the FTC at [e-mail].

If you receive any e-mail that appears to violate the federal anti-spam law in any other way, such as disguising the sender's identity, lack of a physical address or a misleading subject line, forward it to your ISP and the FTC as well.

Only ISPs, state attorneys general and the federal government can bring a civil or criminal action against a spammer under the federal law; individuals cannot. Reporting violations of the law will help those agencies track down spammers and provide evidence for prosecution.

SPAM BY

THE NUMBERS

30 billion: The estimated number of e-mail messages sent on the Internet each day.

15 billion: The estimated number of those messages that are spam.

2.4 billion: The estimated number of spam e-mails blocked every day by both AOL and MSN.

70 million: The number of spam messages once sent out daily by a single known spammer.

$10 billion to $87 billion: The range of estimates of the financial cost of spam to American businesses.

93 percent: The number of American Internet users who use e-mail. It comes to 117 million people.

35: The number of states that passed their own anti-spam laws. Many of those are pre-empted by the new federal law.

- Pew Internet and American Life Project, The New York Times and the Electronic Privacy Information Center 

CAPTION(S):

Jeff Newcomb uses a computer at an Internet cafe.