United We Stand, Disunited We're Spammed

from the global-spam-laws? dept

Over in the UK, Steve Linford, the founder of the excellent Spamhaus project, is saying that we need global spam laws with some sort of global anti-spam enforcement arm. Generally speaking, I think spam laws will do little to stop spam, but Linford (as per usual) makes some good points about spam. As he points out, most politicians don't realize the extent of the problem, and the patchwork of anti-spam legislation showing up throughout the world will do very little to stop spam. In some cases, such as the US, proposed "opt-out" laws will actually do more to encourage spam, since they effectively legalize the practice of spamming. As for the definition of spam, Linford makes the important distinction between unsolicited commercial email and unsolicited bulk commercial email. Unsolicited emails are a normal part of doing business, but simply sending millions of emails to every email address you can find is not the same thing as sending a personalized note to someone you actually want to do business with.

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