Anti-spam activists lead a crusade

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1998 by Alison Ashton

TIRED OF E-MAIL SOLICITATIONS from multilevel marketers and pornographers? So are members of the new Forum for Responsible and Ethical E-mail. FREE (www.ybecker.net) and other anti-spam crusaders say unsolicited commercial e-mail is the scourge of the Internet and eliminating it is a property rights issue.

"No one has the right to advertise on my dime," says FREE founding member Kelly Thompson, noting that consumers ultimately pay for the cost of spam. "Speech isn't free when it comes postage due."

But legislation passed by the Senate in May could make matters worse for home-based workers trying to reduce the amount of spam in their lives. According to FREE, the Murkowski-Torricelli amendment to the Telephone Anti-Slamming Amendments Act of 1998 is a Trojan horse written by the Direct Marketing Association and supported by junk-mail organizations. The amendment only requires spammers to honor "remove" requests within 48 hours.

"It's worse than no law at all because, basically, it makes spam legal," says Thompson. John Mozena, of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E mail (CAUCE, www.cauce.org), predicts that it will unleash a flood of spam requiring consumers to respond to each item, begging to be removed from spammers' lists.

Instead, FREE and CAUCE support the Neffzens' Protection Act of 1997 (NPA), which amends the Communications Act of 1934 to treat spam as unsolicited advertising and allows consumers to sue spammers for up to $1,500 for each message. For the time being, the NPA is bogged down in congressional committees.

Despite the red tape, you don't have to wait for Congress to pass the perfect anti-spam law. Here's how to wage your own war against spam.

Choose an Internet service provider that aggressively filters spam and punishes offenders by terminating their accounts. You can help make this happen by reporting all spam to your ISP.

Learn how to read headers and complain to the originator every time you receive spam. Spammers often forge this information, so you have to read headers correctly in order to track them down. The FREE and CAUCE Web sites both have links to anti-spam resources. Check out spam.abuse.net and www.ao.net/waytosuccess/ antispam.html for complete tools and tips. A good header-reading tutorial is found at doofus.ml.org/ spam/lessons. For spam-tracing software, check out www.blighty.com/spam.> Change the "reply to" address on Usenet postings so spammers can't harvest your real address--this can be done through your email software's settings menu. Then include a signature with your real address in the body of your message. Spammers will harvest the fake address, but you'll still get replies from legitimate users.

Also, avoid posting your address on Web pages because spammers harvest these sites.

Write to your congressional representatives--by snail mail, not e-mail--to voice support for the NPA.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Line56

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