New Spam Law Will Not Stop the Biggest Offenders.

With President Bush expected to sign the CAN-SPAM Act into law, one e-mail marketing authority warns consumers that the flood of annoying and offensive messages will continue to fill their inbox.

“Unfortunately, this law will have no effect on the worst spammers,” says Brian Wm. Niles, CEO of e-mail marketing company TargetX. “Estimates are that 90 percent of all spam comes from about 200 groups around the world. They operate outside the jurisdiction of the United States. “Even more important, they are able to hide their identity,” he added. “They make it impossible for authorities to trace them, so laws that threaten penalties are absolutely meaningless.”

The law authorizes fines of up to $250 a message for mass e-mailers who disguise their identities. “The obvious Catch-22,” said Niles, “is that by hiding themselves, and thus breaking the law, spammers also make it impossible for authorities to trace, identify and prosecute them.”

In addition to requiring marketers to identify themselves by providing a true return e-mail address, the bill also mandates a reliable mechanism for recipients to opt-out of any future mailings. And it prohibits misleading subject lines.

“But legitimate marketers are already meeting these requirements because it’s potentially damaging to their reputation if they don’t,” Niles said. The solution to the problem of spam will not come from laws, do-not-call registries or spam filters, said Niles, but from a fundamental change in the Internet’s e-mail transmission technology.

“The basis of e-mail transmission is a set of rules known as SMTP,” he explained. “It was developed over 20 years ago for a totally different type of Internet, one that was trusting and built on a belief that users would respect the privacy of others. Now that concepts of trust and privacy are gone, we need a change in the way e-mail flows through the pipelines. “It can be done, but it will require a global consensus, which only makes sense considering spam is now a global problem.”