In a recent Washington Post column, Bill Gates advised against responding to spam unless you're absolutely sure the sender is legitimate. Given the new legislation, Gates should have advised users to respond to every piece of spam.
Meanwhile, by responding, we're telling the senders that we do, in fact, read their mail, which encourages them to add our names to the lists they sell to other spammers. To make matters worse, most users don't have a clue how to determine whether a sender is legitimate, so they're spammed if they do and spammed if they don't.
In the Undecided Column
The proposed Do Not Spam Registry could solve part of this problem. Once users sign up for it, they could safely assume that most, if not all, the unsolicited e-mail they receive is indeed spam and report it to their service providers. This registry doesn't exist yet, so there's a window of at least six months for every marketer in the nation to send unsolicited pitches to every e-mail address available. And even if the registry is implemented eventually, there's no guarantee it will be as effective as the Do Not Call Registry. The economic barrier to a phone call is much higher than to an e-mail message, and tracing an e-mail message to its source can be all but impossible.
Ultimately, as editor in chief Rob Preston pointed out in his May 15, 2003 column, spam is a technical problem that demands a technical solution. We need to lock our doors, instead of posting signs that say "Keep Out."
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