WOIFM

Spammerz are Stoopid

E-mail marketers profess confusion about how to comply with the new federal law they wrote to abolish state regulation of spam.

Since the first of the year, the e-mail marketing industry has operated under the Can-Spam Act (full name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act), a federal antispam law so business-friendly, its critics say it might have been written by direct-marketing lobbyists.

But e-mail marketers attending the Spam and the Law Conference in San Francisco Thursday said some aspects of Can-Spam remain unclear. They are uneasy about potential exposure to lawsuits by government agencies and private Internet access providers.

Well, here it is in a nutshell.

• Don't forge headers.
• Don't harvest e-mail from web sites.
• Honor "unsubscribe" requests.
• Don't worry about state laws that used to regulate you.

That's pretty much all you need to know about spamming. Of course, most spam laws wouldn't be necessary if all spammers would honor the first and foremost rule of commerce, online or otherwise:

• Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.