New UK spam legislation worthwhile or worthless?

December 11th saw the introduction of new UK regulations to tackle the burgeoning problem of unsolicited commercial email or spam which the UN claims to be costing as much as $20.5bn per year. Although Sophos, a specialist in anti-spam and anti-virus protection for businesses, welcomes any more to reduce this plague, it believes this legislation will be largely ineffective, particularly for business users of email.

The UK legislation--based on EU guidelines--will mean that unsolicited commercial email tan only be sent to individual subscribers who have granted prior permission (called 'opt in'). However, there are loopholes which will enable spammers to keep targeting business users, clogging up their email inboxes unless they have elective anti-spam software in place. UK legislation is also powerless to tackle spam originating in other countries. With the vast majority of the world's spam thought to come from the US, and with its anti-spam laws (known as controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act or CAN-SPAM), taking a relatively soft stance on spammers (by putting the onus on the recipient to opt out), Sophos believes that the new UK legislation will not have any noticeable impact on the volume of spam.

The UK is taking a tougher stand against spam than some countries, but this is toothless without buy-in from the test of the world. The vast majority of spam originates from the USA, where

CAN-SPAM laws mean--you can spam. Spam is a global issue and needs a global solution.

In addition, Sophos's statistics reveal that a third of spam is sent from 'hijacked' innocent computers, making tracing and prosecuting offenders rather difficult. Technology also allows spammers to disguise their location so introducing laws on a country-by-country basis will have little impact.

Information on best practice for minimising exposure to Spam is available at: http://www.sophos.com/spaminfo/bestpractice/