The Senate last night approved the nation's first federal anti-spam legislation "after reaching a compromise". The latter phrase should tell you that it isn't going to accomplish very much.
The bill, sponsored by Sens. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and approved 97-0, would target the most unsavory spammers by prohibiting e-mail that sells financial scams, fraudulent body-enhancement products and pornography.Fine, but we're also inundated with a lot of other trashy unsolicited e-mail for which this bill would only create a safe harbor.
Anybody who expects the federal government to protect them from spam deserves a mailbox full of ads for penis enlargers and brain supplements.
The only person who can protect you from spam is you, possibly with the help of some filtering technology, but even that is not necessary. Here is what you need to do, it worked for me.
1) For your normal email correspondence, use a personal email address that you never, ever give out to people you don't really trust. Do not post it in plain text on any website, including in any blog comments.
2) Keep a separate email address for dealing with online merchants and websites that require registration, etc. Free services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. are perfect for this. You expect this mailbox to fill with spam. On the other hand, you won't check it very often, and you can do a mass clean-up every once in a while. Just don't save any important data in the inbox.
3) If your current personal email address is clogged with spam, change it. Notify frequent correspondents that your email has changed, and have the old email reply with an automatic response that gives people directions to obtain your new email address. Just make the directions obscure enough that a spammer script won't be able to extract the email address -- e.g. give a URL for a webpage that contains your new address, where the email address is in a graphic file, not in plain text.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 23, 2003 11:30 AMThanks for the entry. Until I saw this article, I was not aware that there was a safe harbor provision, or that it barred private suits or, worst of all, preempted tougher state laws. Taken together, these factors make it appear to be a pro-spam bill, in disgiuse.
One of the things the California Legislature has done right in recent months was to to pass a real anti-spam law. It's a shame that Congress is bent on killing that law before it even takes effect.
Posted by: Xrlq on October 24, 2003 10:39 AM