Not only is the FTC business friendly, but so is Congress, and the Courts (which struck down the junk fax law). As MAPS discovered with Exactis, real commercial solicited email can not be blocked. Of the Type 1 spammers, there are those that send solicited mail and those that send unsolicited. They all want to operate with least annoyance, and least complaints. I expect this group to utilize the DMA do-not-send lists. So I expect that they will become less of a problem as time goes by. Type 1 operations will make changes to comply with law, and will not be fraudulent. I don't think this is anywhere close to the dominant form of spam. But if they were, things would be pretty good. I think it is the little operations that don't (yet) have these facilities, and are misled by operations like ghostsender.com, which incidentally could be itself controlled. So even the little ones should be less of a problem in the future. Of course, ISPs could help by educating users on how to use the internet commercially, such as how to use the DMA do-not-send list, and what sort of cons are out there (like ghostsender.com). Particularly, users should understand the general absence of true anonymity afforded by the internet. The internet is no really no different from the PSTN, in that respect. I think this mis-perception contributes to the abuses of the internet, not just spam, but other kinds of abuses as well. The Type 2 abusers are relatively easy to find. That isn't a tough one to solve. This type probably won't ever go away, but this should not be any more significant than other kinds of con-artists and grifters. The real difficulty will be the Type 3's. But we don't know how much is Type 3 yet. If its not a big proportion, then this shouldn't be a big problem. On the other hand, if it is a big proporation, then we need to interest the law enforcement agencies to chase down more "Kevin Mitnicks" conducting "victimless" crimes. This could be harder to motivate, and at present, no one is working on this that I know of. --Dean On Mon, 26 May 2003, Bob Braden wrote: > > *> > *> Type 1: Bonafide Messaging with a real Commercial or non-profit(ie > *> political) purpose. This includes people selling contraband (eg drugs) > *> illegally, so long as they intend to deliver the illegal goods. > *> > *> > *> > *> > *> Of these types of spam, Type 1 and Type 2 can be dealt with by law, and > *> through the actions of the FTC and other regulatory agencies. > > So, what happens when the FTC, which is today very business-friendly, > decides to place no restriction at all on "real Commercial" spam? > Given the current politics in Washington, that seems like a likely > scenario. Yet, this spam is the most hard-to-filter, and it may soon > become the dominant component of spam. I for one don't want to see my > email box filled with junk as my postal mailbox is. > > Bob Braden >