Anti-Spam bill
The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed some new anti-spam legislature that is expected to sail through the Senate as well. And it’s not too bad — especially that is particularly forbids forged email heads and commercial email with unclear or misleading subjects. But there are problems,
First, it uses ‘out-out’ guidelines, where an otherwise legitimate piece of spam is ok until the user request to be removed from their list. I would have prefered ‘opt-in’ guidelines, whereby spam is only ok after a user has specifically requested it.
But something else could be a bit more of a problem. The legislation also calls for the creation of a Do-Not-Spam list, similar to the national Do-Not-Call list. Now this is a good idea, if only it would work. The first problem with it is the difficulty in enforcing such a list. But something that concerns me so much more is the fact that there will be a centralized list containing millions of valid email addresses. It would be an even better list than what spammers buy now, because the email addresses in the list are already confirmed. This is downright dangerous. I’m going to create a new email address and put it on the list, and see how long it takes before I get spam on it.