Poynter Forums

I'm aware that Steve is not a great fan of the latest Danish court-rulings, but Denmark (among other countries) has a law which may be noteworthy.

Unsolicited commercial mail - a.k.a SPAM :-) - was made illegal two years ago. The specific wording is in the "Marketing Law", §6a. (Markedsføringsloven), which also prohibits unsolicited faxes.
http://147.29.40.91/DELFIN/HTML/A2000/0069929.htm

The few times I've received spam from Danes - and contacted the sender, they have all appologized on their knees. Often they simply weren't aware of the law. The European Union has a law against spam on the way, and a few US states have the same, as far as I remember. But what about the rest of the states - or a federal US law?

I'm fully aware that this is not the perfect solution, as spammers may move to other countries, but it would make it much more difficult / risky for the amateur-spammer who just bought a cd with zillions of mail-adresses.

I'm aware that a ban on spam, could prevent fairly legitimate commercial purposes, but if the increase in spam continues, millions of people could spend billions of minutes receiving, sorting and deleting spam. The most powerful tool of the Internet is rapidly degenerating.

Ernst Poulsen
ernst@ernstpoulsen.com

The preferable solution, of course, is to examine the *sender* of the email message. From what I know of Internet email, though, it's relatively easy to spoof the sender's address, and I don't know whether filtering software would recognize it. Still, I find that if I am reasonably diligent about adding "spamming" domain names to my Outlook filter list (probably adding an average of one per day), I can keep my inbox relatively free of unsolicited email. If I can do it, so can the email filtering companies that are charging money for their software.

At a minimum, these companies ought to test the "unsubscribe" links for every promotional email -- and if they don't work, put those domains on a spam list and, if relevant, inform the sender's ISP.