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Spam Gets Canned Federal Anti-Spam Law to Take Effect January 1

By Jennifer Carroll Archie
December 01, 2003

As widely reported in national media throughout 2003, junk e-mail or “spam” increased exponentially in the last 2 years, prompting state and federal regulators and legislators to reexamine the role of government in regulating this means of commercial advertisement. This fall, the U.S. Congress stepped in, with the ambitious goal of protecting the viability of e-mail as an instrument of interstate commerce.

Federal bills to regulate the means and content of commercial e-mail advertisements have been introduced in every Congress since at least 1998. Until this year, these bills did not receive much attention. But the massive increase in spam experienced in 2002-03 and the passage of a very stringent California spam law propelled federal spam legislation to the top of the congressional agenda this fall.

Over those years, more than 35 states enacted laws regulating spam in some form or fashion. Legitimate marketers and businesses adapted to these various state laws, gravitating toward a fairly uniform best practices model, which stopped short of the sort of true “opt-in only” model strongly preferred by consumer and anti-spam groups. Mailers could be fairly confident that they would avoid liability under state spam laws and not overly alienate Internet service providers (ISPs) or their own customers by simply including valid contact information, honoring “opt-out” requests, providing accurate headers and routing information, using nondeceptive subject lines and (in a few states) labeling the messages as advertisements.

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