Antispam advocates question Senate bill

Not surprisingly, vendors of antispam technologies agreed that technology needs to be part of the solution, with some suggesting that antispam technologies will go further to help e-mail users than CAN-SPAM will. The spirit of the law is headed in the right direction, and CAN-SPAM can help set a moral tone against spam, said Dave Jevans, senior vice president of marketing at Tumbleweed Communications Corp., an e-mail firewall vendor based in Redwood City, California.

But CAN-SPAM won't be enforceable, Jevans said, because it's difficult to validate the identify of any Internet user and because a large percentage of spam comes from outside the U.S. CAN-SPAM might make some potential spammers think twice before getting in the business, but the amount of spam sent is doubling about every two months, he said.

"The growth will outweigh by far the amount of spam stopped by CAN-SPAM," Jevans said.

Jevans called for a blend of legislative and technological approaches to fighting spam, including requiring that e-mail carry a digital signature establishing the identity of the sender.

Another antispam vendor expressed even less hope that CAN-SPAM would stop spam. The bill might stop legitimate marketers from employing spam techniques, but would do nothing to stop hackers from using spam as a tool for identity theft, said Pete Privateer, senior vice president for product strategy and marketing at Internet Security Systems Inc., a security and antispam vendor based in Atlanta, Georgia.

"This bill is like trying to write a law to ban viruses," Privateer said. "It's just about that effective. I expect the volume of traffic in your in-box to increase."

But Al DiGuido, chief executive officer of Bigfoot Interactive, a New York City-based provider of e-mail marketing services, said CAN-SPAM would at least clear up the confusion of more than 30 state laws dealing with spam. "We're really excited about federal guidelines that will put an end to all the chaos and confusion on a state-by-state basis," he said.

DiGuido agreed with Wyden that the legislation will be one piece in the fight against spam. He recommended that reputable marketers work on a fee-based e-mail system, where they pay a small fee to Internet service providers to create "white lists" -- lists of commercial entities that are permitted to send e-mails -- to ensure that their messages are delivered.

"There will be some real teeth put behind the law that will impose jail terms and significant penalties from a dollars and cents standpoint," he said. "We also think ... the criminal element has been trying to evade the law for some time now, so they'll continue to try to find ways to evade the law."