Senate Passes Anti-Spam Measure

Hoping to slow the proliferation of unwanted e-mail, the Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved legislation aimed at regulating spammers who send out nearly 100 billion electronic sales pitches a day.

The 97-0 Senate vote caps a four-year effort to curb e-mails selling pornography, get-rich schemes and weight-loss elixirs. The unsolicited missives tax computer equipment and cost an estimated $10 billion a year in lost productivity.

“Kingpin spammers are threatening to drown the Internet in a sea of trash,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who sponsored the so-called Can Spam Act bill. “The key is to pass this bill and come down hard on violators.... For the first time, big-time spamming would become an outlaw business.”

The Senate bill would prohibit deceptive subject headings in e-mails and require all e-mail marketers to include a return address that would allow recipients to have their names deleted from spammers’ databases.

The measure also authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to set up a registry -- similar to the national “do-not-call” list for telemarketers -- that would allow people to make their e-mail addresses off-limits.

Currently, only some marketers offer the option for recipients to opt out of e-mail databases. Under the Senate bill, consumers and Internet service providers could bring civil claims against spammers, while the FTC and state attorneys general would enforce criminal penalties. Violators would face as much as one year in jail and fines of as much as $1 million.

The bill would require changes in consumers’ e-mail habits. For instance, consumers have been told to delete unwanted e-mails rather than respond to requests to “unsubscribe” from e-mail lists. That’s because the links often do nothing more than tell spammers that messages have been read -- and generate more spam.

The Senate measure would require commercial solicitations to contain legitimate “unsubscribe” links.

Senate passage is expected to jump-start action on a similar bill pending before a House subcommittee. President Bush has not indicated whether he would sign an anti-spam measure, but most observers say he is likely to do so because the effort is similar to the anti-telemarketing legislation that Bush championed.

But experts say curbing spam won’t be nearly as easy as cracking down on telemarketers.

Spam is cheap and easy to send. Sophisticated software scours chat rooms and Web sites for e-mail addresses. A spam operation can be run by one or two people from their homes with a couple of personal computers and an Internet connection.

Nearly 50% of all e-mail traffic this year is considered spam. Spammers can’t be easily traced, because unsolicited e-mail can be sent anonymously using forged headers or routing data.

As a result, even supporters acknowledge that anti-spam legislation alone won’t curb unwanted e-mail.

Still, consumers groups praised the Senate’s action.

“We are not getting a perfect anti-spam law,” said John Lozena, co-founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, which has lobbied Congress on the issue, “but we think what’s coming out of this is a good start.”