Discussion of Spam and Its Effects on My Productivity

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1. What is Spam?
2. Legalities of Spam
3. Spam and My Productivity
4. Spam Resources

What is Spam?

According to http://spam.abuse.net, Spam is "flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender."

There are two main types of spam, and they have different effects on Internet users. Cancellable Usenet spam is a single message sent to 20 or more Usenet newsgroups. (Through long experience, Usenet users have found that any message posted to so many newsgroups is often not relevant to most or all of them.) Usenet spam is aimed at "lurkers", people who read newsgroups but rarely or never post and give their address away. Usenet spam robs users of the utility of the newsgroups by overwhelming them with a barrage of advertising or other irrelevant posts. Furthermore, Usenet spam subverts the ability of system administrators and owners to manage the topics they accept on their systems.

Legalities of Spam

As is often the case in the technology field, legislation finds itself constantly rushing to catch up with the new environments created by technical advances. No where is this more true than in the realm of the Internet. State, National, and International lawmakers are scrambling to draft appropriate legislation for issues including Spam. The following is a summary of Spam bills introduced to Congress over the past year:

• Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 (H.R. 718) H.R. 718 was introduced in February 2001 as the Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001, by Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM), with 67 co-sponsors. As introduced the bill was identical to H.R. 95. The bill was amended on several occasions during 2001; the version that emerged from the Judiciary Committee in June 2001 bears little resemblance to the original. The current version of H.R. 718 would prohibit false headers in unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail messages, and would require labels on sexually oriented commercial e-mail messages.

• Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 (H.R. 1017) H.R. 1017 was introduced by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) in March 2001. It would amend federal computer crime laws to make it illegal to send unsolicited bulk e-mail messages containing a false sender address or header, or to distribute software designed for this purpose.

• Netizens Protection Act of 2001 (H.R. 3146) H.R. 3146 was introduced by Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-NJ) in October 2001; it is identical to the Netizens Protection Act of 1999, which was introduced by Rep. Smith in the 106th Congress. H.R. 3146 would require all unsolicited e-mail messages to contain the sender's name, physical address, and e-mail address, along with opt-out instructions. False or misleading subject lines would be prohibited on unsolicited bulk e-mail messages. These requirements would not pre-empt state laws governing unsolicited commercial e-mail. Internet providers would be required to notify their customers of their policies on unsolicited e-mail, and would be able to sue customers for violations.

Spam and My Productivity

It would be very difficult to place a value on the amount of productivity that I have lost due to Spam advertising. The productivity losses can be grouped into the following classifications:

1. Time spent deleting useless emails
2. Frustration and anger that requires significant cool down time to resume normal activities
3. Mistakenly deleted emails that appeared to be Spam and were actually very important
4. Responses to the lowlifes who do this crap        

   All said, there is no telling what I could have accomplished and where I could have gone in the world had Spam not intruded!!

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   Spam Resources

    

   SpamCop

   A tool that allows you to paste in spams that you receive, and then traces the source of spams and assists you in complaining to the spammers' ISPs.

    

   Spamex

   SpamEx provides anonymous e-mail addresses to its users, and the ability to create new ones on an as-needed basis, so that different addresses can be given out to different companies and people. The SpamCon Foundation Law Center

    

   SpamLaws

   A collection of Federal and State statutes that pertain to UCE. (Formerly on jmls.edu)

      

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