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« on: December 02, 2003, 10:07:00 AM »
Now that the U.S. government has come in to save us all from spam, the serious worrying can start. I've read the Constitution and, honestly, I don't see anything in there about spam or e-mail. There is something in there about Congress regulating interstate commerce. I suppose if they can stretch that to make a federal law creating "drug-free school zones," they can feel proper in regulating spam.
Of course, like many laws, the anti-spam legislation fights the symptoms and not the disease. The symptoms are spam: unwanted e-mail, or e-mail that's not specifically addressed to me, that speaks mistruths in the Subject line, contains garbage, and is sent over and over and over. The disease is the fact that e-mail cannot be verified.
Had Congress passed a law that said, "All e-mail sent between the various states should contain a valid, verifiable, originating address," that would have been enough to stop the problem. But they didn't. Lord only knows what they did.
As far as I'm concerned, the spam problem isn't solved. In fact, any codifying that the government does merely means that the rules spammers can break or ignore are simply written down. Or, better still, that the spammer's lawyers can examine the written Word of Law and easily find the loopholes and simple methods for dodging the law. So spam is going to get worse.
What this means for you and me is that we'll soon see a boost in what I call registered e-mail services. There will be a few dozen of these companies at first. What they'll offer is clean, spam-free, virus-free, and serious e-mail. All the e-mail you receive via registered e-mail will be legitimate. It will all be just for you. It will all be from real people. No junk.
Yep, you'll have to pay more for registered e-mail, probably about $20 per month or more depending on how much e-mail you send or receive. And eventually one or two big registered e-mail companies will swallow up all the small fry. Then, about two years after this idea really takes off and everyone is using it, Microsoft will claim that they thought of it first, do a mediocre implementation that we're all forced to use (and built into Windows Ten-Zillion), and then put all the other companies out of business. Oh, but that's too much of a fantasy, isn't it?
Anyway, don't be surprised to see registered e-mail loom on the horizon as this dang spam issue continues to snowball out of control.
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