How To Spam Legally... And What We Need To Do About It

Via Dan Bricklin: a step-by-step guide to spamming while staying out of jail under provisions of S.877 also known as the CAN-Spam Act (15 USC §§ 7701-13 and 18 USC § 1037 § 7701).

This is not a good law, but as one of the speakers at the MIT Spam Conference explained, there is no political will in the US to move far beyond CAN-Spam into opt-out (loose translation of "no political will": people who want to do "legitimate" email marketing without the inconvenience of opt-in have given more money to politicians than the rest of us have, and are likely to continue to do so), and there would likely be constitutional problems even if the political will did exist. Spammers will know this law inside out. We should too, at the very least so that we can target the spammers who try to follow it but get it wrong.

Given that there are surely going to be many spammers who totally ignore the law, why should we target the ones who are actually trying to follow it but get it wrong? Because law enforcement is likely to try target the most egregious offenders first, but in the meantime there are going to be more and more "legitimate" email marketers now that some of the stigma of spam has been lifted by this law. We need to make sure that following the letter of the law is as expensive (and as ineffective) as we can make it, otherwise the flood of CAN-Spam-compliant commercial email may soon dwarf even the current volume of non-compliant spam.