Is Spam Blocking at Odds with Common Carrier Status?

ISPs in many countries, including the U.S. enjoy a legal status often known as "Common Carrier." Simply put, this absolves the ISP of responsibility if it assists in the transfer of illegal materials, such as copyrighted works or child pornography. The philosophy is that as long as the ISP simply moves data from one place to another -- not making any judgment or discrimination about whether to move one type of data or another -- the ISP should enjoy a "safe harbour."

From time to time, some wag gets the idea that email filtering of spam and viruses would cause ISPs to lose this legal protection. In other words, if an ISP chooses not to deliver a message because it's "spam," the ISP is discriminating based on the content or source, which may remove the safe harbour. When one thinks about it, this is complete nonsense, but stranger things have happened in various legal systems around the world.

This debate is happening again. Thanks to the good work done by MAAWG and others, ISPs are being encouraged to set up outbound spam filtering, to prevent zombified PCs sending spam from their networks, and to encourage users to clean their infected machines with walled gardens. Naturally, some are expressing concern that such discrimination would count as another chink in their common carrier armour.

It's time for the FCC and similar regulators in other countries to step up and make it clear that such genuinely useful -- some would say essential -- discrimination would not affect an ISP's common carrier status.

BTW, sorry for the long hiatus. Call it Blogger's Block. Thanks to Kevin Soo Hoo for helping break it.

Inadvertent Spamming: a Cautionary Tale

I learned today of a well-known software vendor whose business has suffered as a result of poor list management practices. It's not the first, and probably won't be the last. This sorry tale only goes to illustrate the importance of avoiding becoming an inadvertent spammer.

It appears that, although it had been legitimately sending mailings to its customers, the vendor had been ignoring unsubscribe requests. As I've said before, any unwanted bulk email sent by an organization after an appropriate unsubscribe request is spam -- an organization that fails to act on unsubscribe requests in this way is a spammer.

As a result of its failure to honour unsubscribe requests, complaints about the spam began to accumulate at the feet of the various organizations that track spammers' activity. Crucially, these include sender reputation services, such as DNSBLs (also known as IP blacklists). Inevitably, despite the fact that the majority of email it sent was legitimate, the vendor gained a negative reputation as a spammer.

This caused some recipients of its email to reject or otherwise filter these legitimate messages. Not only were legitimate direct marketing messages filtered, but also messages containing customers' license keys, technical support replies, etc.

This is indeed a cautionary tale: the lesson for senders is that the unsubscribe process is truly a mission-critical part of your direct marketing or transactional email workflow. Failure to ensure its integrity can not only cause legal problems, but damage your customer relationships and your business.

This Weblog, "Never fails to entertain and inform..."

"...particularly if you're interested in spam, malware and the like"

Blush.

Well, we like Angela Gunn's Tech_Space too. Proof, if proof were needed, that USA Today isn't just for getting slid under the hotel door first thing in the morning.

Hat tip: Joyce Carpenter for finding the Weird Converter in the first place.

Kate Bush on The Kenny Everett Video Show

It's 1979 all over again. Simple times...


[Hat tip: k8_fan]

It's hard to believe Kenny's been gone for over 12 years.

Spam Causing Email Exodus?

I was asked an interesting question earlier this week. Paraphrased:

With the sheer number of people using semi-proprietary closed systems such as Facebook or Myspace for their personal and business communication, might they be serious contenders for a real spam solution?

Some time ago, I wrote about the, "People are stopping using email" meme. I said then that it's not so much that people are turning their backs on email as a medium, but that they have a wider choice of media available to them now -- such as IM, SMS, and social network websites. They're just more likely to choose the medium best suited to the task. Nothing's changed my mind since then.

Having said that, feel free to poke me, follow me, LinkIn, or whatever.

To paraphrase Meng Weng Wong's recent curry-inspired trendmap, all such media attract spammers if they become sufficiently popular. Lest we forget, spam was first a big problem on USENET -- email came later.