By Vincent Safuto staff writer
May 19, 2003
The Federal Trade Commission recently held a big meeting to discuss the scourge of unwanted advertising e-mail, known far and wide as "spam."
Electronic mail used to be considered one of the greatest gifts of the new era, but thanks to undisciplined use by advertisers, it is now a burden. When I come to work, especially after my days off or a vacation, my first job is to plow through up to 100 junk e-mails.
The public is demanding action on spam, and the government is responding with laws and requirements that may punish those who flood Internet e-mail users with thousands of advertising messages a day, but I worry that the innocent will be punished for the sins of the guilty.
A small part of the advertising e-mail I receive is wanted, believe it or not. I am on the mailing lists of companies that sell products that I'm interested in, including cars, computers and software. Even if I'm not about to buy their product or service, I'm interested in what's new, or what's soon to come.
I call the ones who send out millions of e-mails an hour and flood my mailbox with offers for junk or outright scams "wildcat" e-mailers. They're the ones whose behavior is giving electronic mail a bad name. While I'd like to see them forced to stop flooding the network with messages, I don't want to see those who are using the system the right way punished or eliminated.
A good case in point is a publication called the WinXPnews. It's a free newsletter e-mailed to people who have voluntarily submitted their e-mail addresses and want to receive tips, ideas and advice on using the Windows XP operating system.
A recent issue detailed a problem: Some subscribers complained that they weren't receiving their issue. The company investigated and found that the subscribers' information was current, and the newsletter had been sent to them.
So what had happened? Spam filters, either at the recipients' employers or Internet providers, were deleting the newsletter.
My provider was passing it through to me, but it was being deleted as it was downloaded. I found out that one of my rules for e-mail messages on my home computer was that anything with the word "Win" in the subject line should be deleted to rid my e-mail of the innumerable "contests" that are advertised online.
But the filter is not smart, and it was dumping my newsletter along with the junk. In the same way, solving the problem of spam may turn out to be worse than the problem itself.
Companies that are using and not abusing e-mail should not be punished, even if it means letting the senders of countless weight-loss and credit repair e-mails go unpunished.
Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).
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