KRAMER VS. Email That's Spam

By IRWIN KRAMER
The Daily Record
April 5, 2004 
 

Do you read
email that’s spam?

I do not read it,
Kram-I-am.
I do not read
email that’s spam.

But Congress banned it
here and there?

It didn’t ban it
here or there.
It hardly stopped it
anywhere.

It didn’t ban it
overseas.
And gave us
useless penalties.

But what about the FTC?

Don’t count on the FTC,
and its “Don’t-Spam-Me”
Registry.

Like shoulder of pork and ham,
Politicians tried to can the spam.

But, like the meat that bears its name,
Email that’s spam remains the same.

Congress spent a lot of time on the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act.” It isn’t easy to create a statute that fits the acronym, “CAN SPAM.”

But three months after taking effect, we have only seen an increase in junk emails offering us low cost Viagra, the keys to wealth, and ways to grow hair or other parts of the anatomy. Even millionaires with great sex lives and all of their own hair have seen an increase in offers for software designed to block these unwanted ads.

Why haven’t the spammers gone away? Because many of them already are away. More than 40% of spammers hit the “send” button from foreign nations that don’t ban spam. The rest have disguised themselves with bogus return addresses and identities designed to dodge the long arm of the law.

Congress gave its law a clever name, but left the details to bureaucrats charged with the task of creating a national “Do-Not-Spam” list similar to their “Do-Not-Call” registry. Sounds terrific, until you consider the wisdom of handing spammers a convenient list of active email addresses that they may exploit with impunity overseas.

In the end, it is likely that technology, not law, will stem the tide of junk email. But, if our politicians really want to can spam, they ought to spend more time on the details of their bills than on the nifty names they give them.