No Federal Do-Not-Spam Registry For Now

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "The AP reports today that the U.S. government has no plans to create a do-not-spam registry in the immediate future. Why not? They argue that the proper technology is not yet in place. 'A national do-not-e-mail registry, without a system in place to authenticate the origin of e-mail messages, would fail to reduce the burden of spam and may even increase the amount of spam received by consumers,' said the commission." The moral of the story is: never try. See the FTC's press release or their report (pdf).

Obligatory Simpsons

[swordboy]

Homer: Trying is the first step towards failure.

Wait wait wait...

[JoeLinux]

I thought they had this now: Isn't it the "Opt-Out" thingy?

Thank GOD!

[Anonymous Coward]

My processed lunch meat business will continue for now.

Too Bad

[jumpingfred]

They should have a do not spam list. It will kill off at least one segment of spam. Spam mails trying to sell you a list of valid email adresses.

Murphy's Law

[Networkink*Man]

Spammed if you do, spammed if you don't.

Re:Wait wait wait...

[mkeroppi]

Only that the government will do it more efficiently.

Rule 1:

[wfberg]

spammers lie.

Great the FTC caught on to that..

Now if only all those idiots actually ordering Viagra, Vicodin, larger penisses and mortgage quotes would get the message..

Perhaps a more viable option for enforcement would be sting-operations, where if you buy a spamvertized good, you the exact opposite of the advertized benefit. Higher mortgage! Smaller penis!

When it finally goes up..

[NanoGator]

... I'm gonna report myself as '*@*.*'.

Re:MORONS!

[mr.scoot]

Washington, DC [DeRoot News Service] - In other news today, the FTC's newly commissioned antispam service, after only 13 minutes in service, is out of commission.

The FTC NASR regulations currently provide no direction in regards to the service being unavailable. They simply prohibit sending an unsolicited email without having first received an "ALLOWED" response within the last 5 days for any address, before sending the message.

As the regulation also provides a $5000 fine per mailing per address for noncompliance, mass mailers are holding their mails pending an emergency regulation expected to be issued later today. A spokesman for the National Association of Bulk Mailers opined "this calamity has brought our operations to a screeching halt". Without a YES response from the [anti-spam] server, he explained, they cannot legally send their critical informational messages.

Jorge McKnightson, FTC Compliance Officer (Electronic Mail), said "FTC is working to provide a solution, optimize global value-added users, engineering cross-platform computer-assisted e-business back-end out-of-the-box eyeballs driven by documented robust e-commerce as rapidly as federal viral process precision allows. The loss of competitive next-generation infrastructures is believed to have been caused by distributed B2C metrics which deoptimized probabilistic metrics ."
When pressed for a less obfuscated statement, McKnightson turned an interesting shade of puce, and mumbled what sounded like "We're working on it. The server got slashdotted."

Obligatory anti-spam checklist

[spoonyfork]

Your post advocates a

(*) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

(*) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(*) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(*) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(*) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(*) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(*) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(*) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(*) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Proper technology?

[Rai]

They argue that the proper technology is not yet in place

Unless I'm mistaken, we've had laser-guided missiles since the first gulf war which is all the technology we need to deal with spammers. It didn't take some Navy supercomputer to find Eric Head or Scott Richter and any half-assed napalm-delivery system would easily show them the error of their ways.

Re:I Don't Want the Gov't Telling Me What's Spam!

[Trillan]

Political opinions? You want them?

Here's a clue: If it's bulk and you didn't ask for it, it's spam. It doesn't matter if it is a product you want, or an opinion you want to read, or a service you want.

People who care more about content than delivery -- "Oh, well, I didn't ask for that ad, but sure I need my penis enlarged!" "Hey, I could make a lot of money helping this exiled Nigerian prince!" "I'm awful glad senatorial candidate McDuff sent out 3.5 million emails (1 million of them outside his area) to let us all know he supports gun control." -- are what's known as a willing victim. And that one moron in a thousand is why there's a spam problem to begin with.

If it's spam, either report it, teach your filter it, or delete it. But do not put any put any weight in the content, even if you find it interesting.

Because little Joey Adams who went missing off the deck of his house in the summer of 1999 never actually went fucking missing, the FBI just took him back from the parent who didn't have custody of him.