Professors, experts shoot down new spam proposal

"I want to pay off your debt."

"How I lost 77 pounds."

"Sexy women awaiting your arrival."

No, this isn't heaven.

Rather, for some Internet users, these often counterfeit spam messages are pretty much the opposite -- clogging e-mail inboxes and causing carpal tunnel syndrome due to excessive use of the delete key.

But, with the new Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, Congress is taking action to solve the problem of unsolicited e-mails. The Senate passed a version of the Can Spam Act on Nov. 25, and the House of Representatives and then the president will be deciding whether to approve the bill within the next few weeks.

But just like the spam messages themselves, this bill may be too good to be true, according to Penn computer experts.

"I think it will have an effect on some of the larger companies that are into this business, but a lot of the e-mail one gets is often done by smaller one-person firms, and somebody who really wanted to circumvent these rules by falsifying his address or otherwise disguising the source could probably do it," Penn Computer and Information Science Professor C.J. Taylor said.

The most recent version of the bill considers spam a significant problem both because millions of Americans use e-mail on a daily basis and because spam now accounts for the majority of e-mails that users receive.

"The receipt of a large number of unwanted messages also decreases the convenience of electronic mail and creates a risk that wanted electronic mail messages, both commercial and noncommercial, will be lost, overlooked or discarded amidst the larger volume of unwanted messages, thus reducing the reliability and usefulness of electronic mail to the recipient," states the introduction of the bill, which goes on to explain that spam costs users time and money and often includes offensive, pornographic material.

To remedy this problem, the bill requires that all senders identify themselves accurately, use appropriate subject lines that fit the body of the e-mail and give readers an easy way to opt out of the senders' database of recipients. In addition, the bill would enable Internet service providers like America Online to sue those who violate these conditions.

But CIS Professor Carl Gunter stressed that enforcing the bill's provisions might be easier than getting it passed, which has taken several months already.

"The chances of legal enforcement seem a little bit weak, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try," Gunter said.

Others are lot more skeptical.

"Among the universe of spam laws that the congress could have passed, this is about the worst," said John Levine, co-chairman of the anti-spam subset of the Internet Research Task Force.

Levine added that one of the biggest problems with the bill is that it does not give individual citizens any realistic mechanisms to combat spam on the smaller scale.

"The bad news is that if you get one of these stinky fraudulent spams, you can't do anything about it," Levine said, adding that taking legal action will be difficult even for large companies. "There's a limited right for e-mail providers... to sue senders who don't stop when you tell them to, but the suit needs to be filed in federal court, which is very expensive and cumbersome."

On the other hand, sending spam can be quite inexpensive and easy, Taylor said.

"A standard PC that costs less than $1,000 can generate millions of e-mail and the software -- some of it -- is readily available on the Web to carry out some of these spam generation activities," Taylor said.

In addition, Gunter explained that since many spammers send mail from abroad, this new law will have no bearing on a large portion of the e-mails that people receive.

According to Taylor, there are some mechanisms that could be more effective than the Can Spam legislation.

"A variety of ideas are being thrown around, like being able to charge for e-mail or various challenge-response systems, where in order to send e-mail to a particular person, you would have to fill out a form or respond to a challenge to verify that you are a real person rather than an automated spam system," Taylor said.

Until then, he added, e-mail users will simply have to continue to ignore and delete all this unwanted mail.

"I suspect that spam is actually going to get worse before it gets better," he said. "Ultimately, we'll either have to agree to give up some of our anonymity online to make people responsible or actually pay for the privilege of using the Internet."

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