Add Me To Your Whitelist!

The ‘Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act
of 2003’, or the ‘CAN-SPAM Act of 2003’ is ready to bite all spammers. The
Federal Trade Commission now has the authority to establish a Do-Not-Spam
registry. It is now time that the Indian authorities follow suit.

A landmark event took place in the USA, when on December 16, 2003, President
Bush signed into law the ´Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography
and Marketing Act of 2003´ (CAN-SPAM Act). This law establishes a framework of
administrative, civil, and criminal tools to help America’s consumers,
businesses, and families combat unsolicited commercial e-mail, known as spam. If
this Act does not succeed in banish spam, it will really become the "Can
Spam!" act instead of proving to be the "Can´t Spam" act that it
hopes to be.

Though the law took effect from 1st of January 2004, service providers like
EarthLink and America Online haven´t seen much reduction in the volume of spam
traffic. Spam approximately accounts for over 50% of all the e-mail traffic in
countries like the USA, with costs to fight it exceeding $10 billion a year.
Brightmail Inc, the leading spam-filtering company, filters out about 60% of the
e-mail it handles for its clients as spam.

LOOKING TOWARDS ASIA

As the anti-spam measures become stricter, spammers may only be forced to
route their traffic through computers in Asia so they would be harder to track
down. Spammers can successfully use unprotected machines and networks overseas
and turn them into spam-delivery engines.

Many SMTP server administrators do not take authentication seriously and as a
result, are open to being used by spammers to deliver their bulk-mailings. I
have searched through the details from many bulk e-mails originating from Indian
marketers as well and found that even the Indian spammers are not far behind
their American counterparts. They can easily disguise their origins and mislead
you.

Online marketers will start looking for escape routes and slip through them
by altering the text of the messages they send out daily to millions of
recipients. The Do-Not-Spam registry will be so huge, it may become impossible
to cross check every e-mail address in your mailing list to see if it is there
in the Do-Not-Spam list!

The CAN-SPAM law makes it illegal to disguise the originating Internet
address of spam, to use misleading subject lines, and to electronically harvest
e-mail addresses from Web pages using automated crawler software, which can then
be used to send spam or be sold to other marketers.

The law also requires that marketers provide valid ways for consumers to
request to unsubscribe from the list, and to honor those requests. Marketers
also must place their physical addresses on their e-mails. Some smart marketers
have started inserting a line at the end of their spam-mails that says
"Only one time mailing" or "You will not receive any more mails
from us" or some such thing, escaping from the requirement to provide a
valid "Unsubscribe" link.

Obviously, they are going to send their next mailer using a different
identity! The law makes the sender responsible for handling unsubscribe
requests, not necessarily a list owner. Recipients may unsubscribe form every
advertiser in their inboxes yet continue to receive advertisements from other
advertisers who may have purchased the same list.

DO THESE LAWS WORK

However well intentioned, such laws will not work unless the marketers
self-regulate their mailing activities. For example, the Direct Marketing
Association already keeps a do-not-spam list of 700,000 e-mail addresses that
its members are asked

to remove from their mailing lists before sending any bulk-mailings.

The best way for marketers to build trust is to go through the route of
permission marketing. Get people to subscribe to your mailing list, rather than
bombarding them with bulk mail and telling them to unsubscribe. The technology
is now well advanced to handle subscribe and unsubscribe requests automatically.
We only need to take a professional approach and honour the privacy of others on
the Internet. E-mail marketing is a very powerful tool. But, if misused by many,
it may ruin the chances of even the serious and sincere marketers.

As the e-mail travels over the Internet, it is not bound by national
boundaries. So, it will also be very difficult to enforce the laws from one
country to other. It will take years before a standardized worldwide anti-spam
law can take shape. Till then, it´s up to us to make our own choices. As
marketers, we must regulate ourselves and build trust. As recipients of
bulk-mail, we must take action to filter out as much of spam as possible. There
are many types of spam filters available. Using keyword based filtering; you can
slowly build a profile for yourself to keep out messages, which have the
unwanted keywords in the subject line or body of the e-mails.

Be careful, sometimes very funny results can be achieved by such filtering.
One of my clients who use this kind of filtering had ´Sex´ as an unwanted
keyword in the list. Everything worked fine till they advertised for a vacant
position in the company and invited applications via text-only e-mail. Those
candidates who had mentioned - Sex: Male or Sex: Female in their resumes, got
promptly moved to the junk mail folder!

Another way to keep out spam very strictly is to apply a "Whitelist"
filter to your incoming mails. A Whitelist is a list of acceptable e-mail
addresses that can send you a mail. Though this is an extreme measure, we may
have to opt for this option one day if the percentage of spam mails goes up at
the current speed. So, if I want to send you an e-mail, first I have to tell you–
"Add me to your Whitelist!"

Ashok Dongre is an independent consultant