ISP Review investigates why new laws against SPAM aren't working

Junk/SPAM E-Mail would only be allowed / legal if it contained an easy and available method of opting-out of that particular message and list (Auto-Remove/Reply Remove etc.).

Just before the end of the year, pre-Christmas 2001, the EU finally voted for the Opt-Out option, which has unfortunately meant that nothing much will change.

To be fair you'd think things would be better because after getting one message you didn't like then you could easily stop anymore from coming, sadly there's a bigger problem that seems to have been overlooked - cheating the system.

THE BIG PROBLEM

During our research into the problems of SPAM we used several E-Mail addresses associated with other websites, they seem to be plagued with SPAM. Through this we were able to discover several rather worrying factors.

Firstly we found that while 80-85% of E-Mails included an Opt-Out policy, the methods used either didn't work or appeared to work and yet the E-Mails didn't stop. In fact after two weeks of trying to remove 30 constantly re-occurring messages from one inbox we ended up with 19 that wouldn't go away!

Why you ask? Simply because most of the messages contained a link to an external Opt-Out system that was either off-line or didn't load/work properly.

We found ourselves visiting the same familiar Opt-Out sites time and time again and yet not once did entering our E-Mail(s) and clicking remove do any good, the messages kept on coming. The majority of sites didn't even include contact details for the owner of the list and not doing so is technically illegal because they're holding your personal details (Data Protection Act).

Some of the remove systems we used were also quick to approve our removal. Further inspection showed that these were merely cosmetic, most didn't even access an external database; they were simple HTML forms designed with an output such as "Removal from list approved".

Other E-Mails asked us to reply with 'Remove' in the subject line or to simply send a blank message to a specific address; while some of these worked, we noted that several appeared to have no effect. In short, the majority of E-Mails, which appeared to abide by new laws, were actually cheating with remove features that don't do anything.

What's worse is that once you're removed from a list there's nothing to say that a system can't simply hunt you down to be re-added again. You can't even physically block the addresses because most of them constantly change the sender's location.

The Solution?

With unscrupulous companies bending the laws and cheating people out of the ability to Opt-Out, the only real solution is for a special online task force to be setup that's able to combat and arrest the cheats. Typically this is unlikely to ever happen and even if it did, how would they cope with the issue of cross-border breaches? Mails sent from countries that haven't banned SPAM.

So what does this all mean? SPAM is here to stay, we'll never be rid of it and even if the governments were to clamp down then we'd predict they could only ever stop a tiny portion because of the Internets free and global nature. That's not to say a TOTAL BAN wouldn't help, simply that you could NEVER police it.

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