Email Needs Federal Involvement

Previously I have discussed the premise of governmental interaction with regard to e-mails. It was then-and is now-my opinion that with some government involvement, unscrupulous vendors will think twice about the content of their unsolicited broadcast e-mails and whom they are targeting.

Several key events that are shaping today's e-mail marketing arena. An article in the Nov. 3 issue of Time magazine quoted a staggering statistic: Of the 9 million e-mail messages processed by America Online each day, up to 20 percent are unsolicited broadcast messages. In recent months AOL has filed two lawsuits, one against a firm in Kentucky for deluging AOL members with ads for "online entrepreneurs."

Unfortunately though, despite the numerous lawsuits intended to keep bulk e-mailers at bay, spam e-mail has increased in volume while becoming more pervasive.

New technology is making it more difficult for a user to distinguish between e-mail that is wanted vs. spam messages. One of these technologies involves "cloaking," which is the masking of key header information in the e-mail that identifies the actual sender.

The situation with cloaked e-mail has become so severe the Federal Trade Commission has expressed concern regarding the legality of such practices and has requested industry assistance in self-regulating to solve the problem.

There are also unscrupulous techniques that involve creating "false" e-mail addresses and broadcasting e-mail via another firm's server without them even knowing it.

The barrage of unsolicited e-mail is keeping the federal courts busy as well. As reported by EDGE: Work-Group Computing Report (Aug. 25), a Tokyo-based ISP filed a ground-breaking lawsuit in the U. S. District Court to stop a Los Angeles company from flooding the ISP's servers with masses of spam e-mail ads and placing a false return address on those messages.

Bigfoot Partners LP filed a lawsuit against one of the largest bulk e-mailers on October 7th, subsequent to the bulk emailer being disconnected by their Internet service provider.