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By Michael D. Jenkins
The chances of your being prosecuted for minor technical violations of the CAN-SPAM act may not be that great, but there are other severe anti-SPAM penalties that can be enforced by private Internet service providers whose servers are being jammed with huge numbers of SPAM messages, costing them both time and energy to deal with it.
These provisions of the new law not only include harsh sanctions, but provide major incentives to ISPs to sue you for violations. Under the CAN-SPAM law, ISPs may seek statutory damages from a SPAMmer who uses their facilities or servers to send SPAM that violates the anti-SPAM rules. The liquidated damages are set at $25 per message and are increased to $100 per e-mail that uses a fake or "spoofed" return address or false header.
An ISP may collect up to $1 million of such statutory damages in an action against a violator.
Congress also ordered the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to create, by July 1, 2004, a "Do-Not-E-Mail" Registry, where anyone who wished not to receive commercial e-mail solicitations could list their e-mail address. Mass e-mailers were supposed, in theory, to refrain from sending e-mail addresses listed on the Do-Not-E-Mail Registry. (Yeah, right.) It was to be similar to the Do-Not-Call Registry that has been established to prevent unwanted telephone solicitations, which has had some degree of success.
Luckily for us, reality soon set in at Foggy Bottom. Recognizing that illicit purveyors of SPAM would most likely use such a registry as just another handy list of e-mail addresses to send their SPAM to, the FTC told Congress on June 15, 2004 that the Do-Not-E-Mail Registry would fail to reduce SPAM, since there is currently no way to enforce the registry effectively against SPAMmers who are outside U.S. jurisdiction.
Thus, the Do-Not-E-Mail Registry will apparently not be implemented by the FTC until technological improvements and international cooperation make it possible to effectively enforce the anti-SPAM laws. That may take a while. Quite a while.
You have probably noticed, if you have an e-mail account, that the anti-SPAM laws have so far had zilch effect on the ever-growing volume of SPAM and "porn mail" we receive daily, since most of the SPAMmers are either outside the United States or are using servers in foreign countries, where U.S. laws cannot reach them or find out who is behind them.
One expert recently estimated that, since the anti-SPAM laws have made it riskier to send SPAM from within the U.S., some 70 percent of the SPAM we receive is now sourced from SPAMmers in China or Taiwan, nations that have shown little if any interest in cracking down on SPAMmers.
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