Spam blocking with law

Posted Jun 28, 2003 11:37 UTC (Sat) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link]

Yes having a microtransaction supported mail system could be very useful, but this goes way beyond SMTP - more a new kind of messaging service altogether. Introducing microtransactions is very difficult, partly due to the psychological preference people seem to have for unmetered but known fixed monthly bills. When microtransactions become a reality, in my understanding this is likely to be based on a similar model to the highly decentralised one I am researching.

An area where the law could have useful impact would be by agreeing large fines and bounties obtainable by those bringing prosecutions and evidence anywhere the spammer is based against a non-controversial definition of the worst kind of spam, i.e. the kind deliberately using outgoing addresses involving domains belonging to innocent third parties (forged letterheads in other words). This is a form of criminal deception which prevents use of the reply button with a complaint being effective. By making this criminal deception very expensive it then becomes much easier to tune technological measures using origin blacklists against mass mailers who don't use confirmed opt-in list management methods or proper complaint handling.

Posted Jun 30, 2003 13:40 UTC (Mon) by mwilck (guest, #1966) [Link]

I don't want legislators handling the tricky definition of unsolicited commercial mail

What is so tricky about that? "Unsolicited" is absolutely clear - everything the recipient didn't ask for. "Commercial" shouldn't be so hard to define either.

The right solution would be to use the free market.

The solution you propose has nothing to do with the free market. It is just an different form of legislation. This can be very compared well to environmental legislation (instead of forbidding to dump waste, we assign a cost to it). This may or may not work better than a simple ban. In any case, the assigned cost is determined by legislation, not by the market.

"Proper targeting" requires you to have detailed knowledge about the recipient's interests (in your words, to know what sort of unsolicited commercial email the recipient would not consider "unwanted"). If that knowledge comes from person himself signing up to your newsletter - fine, it's not unsolicited, it's not spam. Otherwise, you could hardly have gathered that knowledge by legal means, at least not in Europe, because such information is considered private and confidential - you cannot have it unless the person himself has given it to you.