February 1, 2003    

Regarding: Spam, Pornographic Spam, Fraudulent Spam and its Disastrous Effect on ECommerce.

Dear Senator Mikulski,

Looking through your topic choices, I am concerned that this issue may be a less significant one. But it is very important to future business and educational communication in our state and nation. First, I don't represent a PAC or organization. I am writing to you as a small independent business owner and resident of Maryland.

I own a small Web consulting and development firm. We've been in business for about 7 years. Over the years, I have seen the problem of spam (unsolicited email) go from a severe annoyance to a near catastrophic impediment to commerce.

I've experienced first hand how severely impaired email communication has become. With newer technologies making spamming easier, spam has become a major threat to the economy. Despite the failures, ecommerce has been a major bright spot in terms of economic growth in this country and in Maryland. More than ever it is being threatened. Here's a point by point:

1. First hand--Spam volume is growing at an alarming rate. My company IMS has gone from receiving nearly one hundred spams per day only 2 years ago to nearly a thousand per day now.

2. A large portion of spam (probably 60-90%) is fraudulent or pornographic.

3. Spam is getting harder and harder to filter out. A pornographic email subject might read “Free P()rn: N@ked W()m@n” so there’s an endless game of adding new variations to email filters to keep pornographic spam out. But the tricks are now extremely sophisticated such as computer generated random headers.

3. Pornographic and fraudulent spam are sent indiscriminately to minors. Friends and clients are often asking me how to filter out all the pornographic spam to protect their clients and children. AOL and some other major service providers do a fairly good job but can only eliminate 80-90%. This is through very aggressive filtering that removes legitimate email as well. So this is not acceptable for most businesses.

4. Email has been an amazing tool for efficient businesses and educational communication. Legitimate emailing is greatly hindered by the huge volume of noise caused by spam.
 

My questions are:

How can I help?
Is there something I can do to help you work with congress to get a grip on this?
Is there anything coming down legislatively to improve the situation?

I recommend a strategy for stricter spam laws, similar to fax laws. Legislation would need to have teeth to be effective. The fines for violations have to be large enough to make going after spammers worth someone's time. If catching spammers becomes lucrative I believe enforcement is possible.

Here are some ideas for enforcement:

1. all unsolicited email must carry a standard disclosure and a classification (i.e. pornographic, general products, business proposals, consumer services, real estate, etc). This way filtering out undesired emails becomes easy for ISPs, businesses and consumers.
2. all unsolicited email must carry the identity of the sender. There is no legitimate reason to hide your identity if you are acting in good faith.
3. all unsolicited email must go through a national clearinghouse of registered spam free and or spam free/porn free members.
4. software developers, ISPs and other who proactively make it easy for spammers to distribute illegal emails and beat filtering systems would also be prosecuted.

This needs to be nationwide and possibly worldwide to be successful. All countries doing any kind of commerce with the US would need to consider complying or risk getting filtered out of most ISPs email.

Here's a link to an article I wrote a few years ago. http://imarketingsolutions.com/why_spam_is_bad.htm It may be a bit out of date but it contains other links and resources.

Thank you for your interest.

Your humble servant,

Odin Wortman