Unlimited fines threatened for spam emails

[gem]

From Guardian Unlinited

Unlimited fines threatened for spam emails

Senders will need recipients' consent under crackdown

Alok Jha, science correspondent
Friday September 19, 2003
The Guardian

Persistent email spammers could face unlimited fines under new legislation announced by the government yesterday.
From December organisations will need prior consent to send unsolicited emails to individual users, although sending messages to company email addresses will be exempt from the law.

The legislation has been welcomed by companies, who see it as the first step in the fight against the many millions of unwanted messages that clog up email servers around the country.

But anti-spam campaigners said the new laws would make little difference to individual users and will effectively legalise the spamming of company email addresses.

Spam, defined in the legislation as "unsolicited email sent without the consent of the addressee and without any attempt at targeting recipients who are likely to be interested in its contents", has been growing exponentially over the past few years. Brightmail, a company that produces filtering software for internet service providers, estimates that up to 50% of global email traffic last month was spam, compared with 8% two years ago.

The new legislation means that unsolicited emails or mobile phone text messages cannot be sent to users without their prior agreement or unless there is an existing customer relationship.

Any organisation in breach of these terms can be reported to the office of the information commissioner, which has powers to then take the organisation to the courts. In the first instance, magistrates can levy fines of up to £5,000. The organisation can also be referred up to trial by jury, where there is no limit to fines.

But the laws only apply to mail sent from within the EU, which accounts for less than 10% of the total spam sent.

Steve Linford director of the anti-spam campaigners Spamhaus said the fines were "laughable". Organisations intent on sending bulk emails to unsuspecting users would simply factor the fines into the cost of their work, he said.

More worrying, he said, was that the legislation stops short of banning unsolicited emails to individuals in companies.

The Department of Trade and Industry said: "It doesn't apply to business because in the consultations people felt email marketing was a useful business to business tool. We're not proposing to extend it ... but we'll keep it under review."

Derek Wyatt, a Labour MP and chairman of the all-party internet group, says the legislation is the right model to adopt but that problems will arise with different approaches around the world. Of particular concern is the US position - there Congress is on the verge of allowing unsolicited emails to everybody with users themselves having to opt out if they do not want to receive the messages.

Currently spam-mail comes from a relatively small group of individuals scattered around the globe. If mass emailing became legal in the US, the 23m small businesses there could all start sending bulk emails with no constraints. "That will cause an absolute nightmare," Mr Linford said. "It will literally end email."

As a result, a delegation of MPs, led by Mr Wyatt, will travel to Washington DC in a few weeks to try and change the way Congress is approaching the issue.

Mr Wyatt said the government had missed out on the opportunity to require filtering software to be installed on to computers. Mr Linford added that if opt in became law everywhere, then basically spamming would be banned. "At that point, we can mop up all the spammers using technology," he said.

So far Europe has led the way in anti-spamming legislation - Italy has made spamming a criminal offence carrying a maximum three-year jail term. Australia is set to ban spam in the coming months.

Net waste

· It is predicted that by February 2004 70% of all emails will be spam

· The vast majority of unwanted emails are sent by a core group of around 200 spammers who send at least 50m messages each a day. Their hit rate is one sale for every million messages

· The year-on-year growth of spam was 129% in 1999-2001, 261% in 1999-2002 and 300% in 1999-2003

· Adult material makes up 12% of spam filtered by Brightmail; financial help is offered by 14% of emails; improved internet access by 11%; products account for 20%; scams make up 10%; the remaining 33% includes health products, free holidays or offers of free psychic readings

· Top five spam emails according to Brightmail are:

1 penis enlargement

2 Viagra

3 prescription drugs

4 tech products

5 medical

[squidgy]

Their hit rate is one sale for every million messages

If that doesn't put it into perspective ...

Considering the growth of spam, I guess there will be a time when you have to read a million email messages before you find one that's useful. The end of email is not an exaggeration.

But it wouldn't matter if we didn't need to use email from time to time ...

Perhaps there's a better way. Even today, many e-tailers insist on you giving an email address if you want to buy anything. Admittedly, very few of them check that it's valid - but you don't want to give a false email address, just in case the retailer sends a transaction confirmation, with your credit card and personal details, to that email address, and someone else gets it.

Here's my idea - make this illegal. It should be a criminal offence for a retailer to say that they can't process your order without your email address. Email should be strictly optional.

Let's be real - most purchases don't really need email anyway. But some retailers insist on sending you important information by email. For example, a book retailer might let you place a provisional order for a book they don't have in stock. They ask for your email address so that you can be notified when they get it.

In this example, I think the retailer should give you an order number, so that you can chase up orders over the phone, or on a secure web server. If the retailer doesn't provide at least one alternative to email, then they should withdraw the email notification service, or face a penalty.

Offering discounts for email should be illegal too. And email billing. Paperless billing is okay in my opinion, as long as it isn't done by email.

When all this is in place, then most people won't need to use email for anything at all any more. So the spam problem is solved. Whether spam comes from outside the EU or not won't matter. EU citizens are unlikely to want to buy anything from e-tailers outside the EU very often, and it's easier to enforce anti-spam rules against e-tailers in the EU than against spammers outside the EU.

Okay, unlikely maybe. But email was never designed to play the huge part it now has in business communication. As long as business carries on using email, and refuses to change to anything better, then spam will continue to be a problem. I don't think we'll get rid of spam until email is obsolete.

[silver]

I think email is pretty useful really and I don't know of a replacement that exists which could replace it.,.

I would rather give out an email addr (just make up a webmail account that forwards etc) than my phone number

on email - U.K. phone retailer bans e-mail - suspect it is a PR job - but then why did they give ppl PCs - surely not just so they could send email to each other ?

related - <thread>:Really neat way to stop spam ( and sort any email ) a free to use bayes filter that's v effective at removing spam and easy to setup and use

Sil