This page is part of an organized protest against spam. SPAM™ is a processed meat product sold by Hormel. spam is the nickname the Internet has given to unsolicited, unwanted email. It doesn't matter if it's an ad for a porn site, the latest MLM scheme, a complete scam to steal your money, a sincere religious message, or the joke of the month club.
    WE DON'T WANT IT!!!

NO ONE DOES EXCEPT THE spammers!

spammers argue their First Amendment right to Freedom of Speech allows them to send you mail, and there's nothing you can do about it. Of course, this completely ignores the fact that spam crosses international boundaries! Do you really think an Australian computer user cares about United States laws? What about a Belgian businessman who's trying to earn a living on the Internet and has to wade through 10 or 20 porn ads, MLM scams and "healing elixirs" spam messages to find the important email about an order he's received? And the Swedish writer who has a web page to promote her books and is sorting her mail looking for orders? Do you think a German reading email wants to be bombarded with advertising for porn sites, which are illegal in Germany and could get him arrested?

Click here and here and here to learn about US Court decisions which have proven ISPs and individuals have the RIGHT to block ISPs who refuse to stop spam coming from their customers and to SUE both them and the spammer for money damages for fraud, forgery, theft of copyright and theft of services and property.

The right to demand a sender stop sending you commercial mail has been established by the US Supreme Court in Rowan v. Post Office Dept., 397 US 728(1970). It states, in part, "We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient."

In another case; Florida Bar v. Went For It, Inc., 515 U.S. 618 (1995) (upholding temporal ban on direct mail solicitation by personal injury lawyers), the court stated "Indeed, we have noted that "a special benefit of the privacy all citizens enjoy within their own walls, which the State may legislate to protect, is an ability to avoid intrusions." Frisby v. Schultz, 487 U.S. 474, 484-485 (1988)."

For a study of all the above-mentioned litigation and the relationship of the First Amendment to spam, see my page on spam "law". I conducted this study as a reference for my State Senator to provide him with information related to Senate Bill 106, an anti-spam bill which was before the 1999 Texas Senate, but it could be easily adapted to other bills before other state legislatures. Unfortunately, Texas Senate Bill 106 died in the Subcommittee on Technology and Business Growth. It is my understanding that Senator Frank Madla, Democrat from San Antonio, was behind the sabotage of SB106, and that the telemarketing lobby worked hard to get the bill killed. Other members of the Subcommittee are my Senator, John Carona, Senator Troy Fraser, chairman, Senator Mike Jackson and Senator John Whitmire. If you would like to see Texas pass anti-spam legislation, please let these Senators know how you feel, and if your Senator is not a member of the Subcommittee, contact him or her also.

Click here to read testimony before the State of Washington Legislature which explains the cost shifting aspect of spam. The State of Washington subsequently passed an anti-spam bill. The FTC recently commissioned a study on UCE which concluded, among other things, that the cost of UCE to an individual amounted to approximately $2.00 per month in the US. Articles on the Internet have addressed the issue also. Even the spammers themselves ADMIT they are shifting the cost of advertising to the recipient. (You'll also notice they admit deliberately concealing their true identity and location so you can't complain to them.)

Every piece of spam sent out on the Internet has to be handled by equipment that belongs to somebody else; servers, routers, switches, hubs, fiber cable, telephone lines, etc. All these things cost money. Who pays for them? Not the spammer. YOU DO. It is estimated that approximately 10 to 15% of the cost of every online account is due to spam. Here in the US, if you pay $19.95 per month for Internet access, $2 to $3 of that fee is used to pay for equipment to handle the increased volume of mail due to spam. It's even worse overseas. Americans seem to assume that everyone else is just like them. Yet many overseas providers charge BY THE MINUTE or even BY THE BYTE!! for online time. The cost of spam, therefore, hits many people in the wallet as soon as they begin downloading their email.

Here are some sites that keep statistics on spam, and some recent polls on public opinions about spam. I won't post the ones we keep at UTD, but we average 400 to 500 spam blocks and denied relay attempts every day.

There are approximately 513.41 million people on the Internet now. If just ONE PERCENT of those people decided to send each person ONE message, you would have to read and/or delete 1406!! messages EVERY DAY FOR TEN YEARS! FOR EACH EMAIL ADDRESS YOU OWNED!!

But the US CONGRESS doesn't want you to just read 1406 messages a day. They want you to WRITE 1406 messages a day too! That's right! The PRO-spam bill authored by Senator Murkowski is rumored to be reappearing! Senator Murkowski favors a bill which requires YOU to request to be removed from EACH and EVERY list you get spammed from! (Commonly known as OPT OUT.) Then you have to hope! they are ethical and will actually remove you from their list! If not, you get to report it to the FTC, which is understaffed and completely incapable of doing anything about all but the most egregious offenders.

Other bills which have been introduced are the "E-Mail User Protection Act", the "Wireless Telephone Spam Protection Act", the "Can Spam Act", the "Internet Growth and Development Act of 1999", the "Internet Freedom Act", the "Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2000", the "Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of 1999", and the "Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2000". Unfortunately, all of these proposed bills are "Opt Out" bills. Congress just can't seem to understand that we don't want to opt out, we don't want to be opted in in the first place.

What anti-spammers want to see is an amendment to the junk fax law which has worked so well to eliminate junk faxes in this country. That bill is called the Netizen's Protection Act. It requires the sender to identify themselves and to either have a pre-existing arrangement with the recipient or EXPRESS WRITTEN CONSENT before emailing them. (Commonly known as OPT IN.) For a demonstration of a technique for collecting email addresses for an OPT-IN mailing list, click here.

Just hitting delete will no longer work. It won't stop the deluge, which is increasing daily. Even now entire networks are being brought to their knees by the volume of spam being illegally routed through their servers. It's only going to get worse unless WE do something about it.

Worse yet, many legitimate companies are now starting to "advertise" with unsolicited commercial email. If the problem isn't dealt with soon, email will become unusable as a communication forum.

Some will say "I don't get that much spam." There are reasons you don't, YET. spammers harvest email addresses from web pages, mailing list, remove lists, address lists (like Internet phone books) and newsgroups. If you haven't utilized any of those yet, you are less susceptible to spam. Or perhaps you use a provider with an aggressive stance against spam who has effectively sheltered you from the storm.

The only viable solution to spam is to make it economically infeasible. Many ISPs are already charging "clean-up fees" for spam incidents; sometimes as high as $500 US or more. But there are far too many ISPs that for whatever reason have not dealt with the problem. Technical solutions are being implemented as quickly as the software can be written, but the only REAL solution is economic pressure.

There is a blacklist of spammers and there used to be a list of ISPs that have lax policies toward or even ACTIVELY ENCOURAGE spam, but those have all been taken down due to legal threats. Please do not contribute to the well-being of an ISP that doesn't have a strong anti-spam policy. Choose a different provider. A good place to look is the "whitelist", a list of providers with strong Acceptable Use Policies and a ZERO Tolerance policy toward spam.

And COMPLAIN! If nothing else, complain to your own ISP's abuse department. They will follow up for you. Internet policy recommends that every domain have an abuse@ address for you to forward complaints. If your provider doesn't have one, ask them to look up RFC2142 and comply with its recommendation.

If you want to learn how to go after the spammers yourself, subscribe to the newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email and alt.spam or alt.stop.spamming and follow the multitude of web page links to sites that will teach you. The places to start are the Newbie Primer, the home of Sam Spade and Abuse Net. Or visit the anti-spam webring by clicking on one of the links below.

© Paul L. Schmehl, 1998
Last revised: Tuesday, 13-Nov-2001 14:25:02 CST