Canning spam
Spam's prurience has incited legislators -- claiming the mantle of decency -- to throw the book at spam purveyors. The first national spam law reflects that mission in its name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (Can-Spam).
President George W. Bush's signing of that law in December, which capped years of legislative manoeuvring, satisfied next to nobody. Despite a flurry of lawsuits by major email providers, it has yet to curb the flow of spam.
Postini, an email management provider, earlier this month said spam made up about 77 percent of the nearly 5 billion emails that coursed through its system in March. That's up a percentage point from February.
"If this is the test of our ability to deal through legislation with the problems of the Internet age, Congress gets an F," said David Kramer, a partner with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, who has criticised Can-Spam for legitimising unsolicited commercial email. "It's very disheartening to see that 10 years after this problem arose, not only have we done nothing on a legislative front to deal with it, but we've actually made it worse."
Given the international reach of spam and the creativity of spammers, some experts believe that technology will have to play a role in bringing it under control. Proposals have been floated that would revamp the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) email standard to better track the real identity of email senders, among other things. Others have suggested slapping fees on the delivery of email to make spam uneconomical for the sender.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates recently opined that new countermeasures will eventually be found to solve the problem once and for all. But little consensus has emerged to date over what might work.
