One thing that would probably go a long way for many of the state anti-spam
laws would be a way that one could give public notice that the people at a
company / organization / ISP do or do not want spam. The use of the file
as a "public notice" file would go a long way towards allowing people to
collect via the courts.
Of course, we all know the answer to whether they do or not. However,
there currently exists no method for a company to say that they do or do
not want spam for a certain set or subset of users.
What I would like to see is something akin to the robots.txt that is
available on every website. The spammer could be required (perhaps by law)
to download this file and to use it to check against the addresses in their
mailing list.
To hide the user's identity, the e-mail addresses could be hashed to say an
8 byte hash value. This way the list could be checked against the e-mail
addresses in the spammer's mailing list without divulging any one address.
Furthermore, there could be a price specified per e-mail that is sent to
that address. For example, the following could be a line from the file:
0x4348C54233AB4D9C,n,$25U.S.,$500U.S., <Keywords>
0x4348C54233AB4D9C: Hash of the e-mail address
n -- This person does not want unsolicited e-mail.
$25U.S If spam is sent that is relevant (in the opinion of the reader) to
their job, the spam will be assessed at a price of: $25 U.S.
$500U.S If the spam is sent and it is _not_ relevant (in the opinion of the
recipient) to their job then the price of $500 U.S. is assessed.
<Keywords>Keywords and phrases of things that the user is interested in
receiving e-mail regarding. (For most, this would simply be left empty.)
If there were a standard way to give public notice that spam is or is not
wanted at a specific address, it makes it much easier to go to the courts
and make the claim that you gave public notice that you would collect for
all e-mail sent to a given address.
-Art
--
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.
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