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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.
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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.
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