AOL claims it is filtering more than 2 billion spams per day, and this number is increasing geometrically. How much money do you think this costs the company in bandwidth, server capacity, software and administration? Filtering is clearly not sufficient, and things are getting worse.
Regarding legislation, federal laws are not necessarily fated to be as ineffective as most of the state-level antispam laws, primarily because of the lack of equivalent jurisdictional issues. Also, antispam laws that include a right of private action have proved quite effective in states such as Washington. Laws that allow only government to bring action under them are likely to fail because of insufficient resources and responsiveness of government-only enforcement. An antispam law modeled on the TCPA's antijunk fax provisions would stand a much better chance of being effective.
Finally, antispam measures must correctly define spam so as to avoid the problems Preston identifies with provisions against deceptive subject lines and other content-based restrictions. The only truly useful definition of spam is "unsolicited bulk e-mail." Adding any adjective that requires making judgments regarding an e-mail's content is a legal and technical morass. It's about consent, not content.
Darren Gasser
Director of Information Systems
Company name withheld by request
[email protected]
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