"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)

   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
   considering becoming one.
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In this issue:   "Your Newsletter, Spam, and The Law"
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   "The Desktop Global Marketer" is free, and may be 
   re-published freely with permission. We encourage 
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Your Newsletter, Spam, and The Law

E-mail spam. We all hate it, but it works anyway. What should you as
an Internet marketer do? The problem is that what one person perceives
as spam (unsolicited email, usually for promotion of products or
services) may be perceived by another as an interesting
opportunity. Is your newsletter spam? What you may consider a
carefully researched list of potential clients, who might very well be
interested in your service or product, might be viewed by another as a
random mass-mailing.

The problem is more severe than the analogous postal junk-mail,
because junk-mailers pay. You and I pay for email spam in the form of
higher prices for connect time, consumption of Internet bandwidth that
slows our traffic, and our own time when every day we have to weed out
the cleverly-disguised spam mail from the mail we want to look at. In
extreme cases electronic mailboxes can be swamped with spam, causing
loss of real mail.

Spam mailings do get results - about 10% of mass mailings will
generate enqueries if the mailing list is even reasonably targeted to
your service or product. You will, however, tend to develop a bad name
and a low-class online image. You may not care about this if you get
rich from it. Then again, if you plan to be in business long under the
same name, you may. This is really a judgement call. We consider
newsletters to be an important way of informing customers and
maintaining contact with them, but we elect never to send ours to
someone who has not specificly asked to receive it. Your mileage may
vary.

However, there are beginning to be hard practical downsides to spam
mailings. First, many virtual hosting services are getting shy of
hosting marketers who engage in spam. They get the complaints, and
their machines suffer the email-bombs, URL-storms, and other nasty
tricks that enraged spam recipients are increasingly using in
retaliation. Most of them are adopting policy statements that in one
way or another allow them to drop clients that cause trouble by
spamming.  Usually the words "unsolicited" and "complaints" figure
heavily in these statements. Some are simply barring mailing-list
servers from their sites altogether. 

In response some services are springing up to fill the vacated niche
by catering to spammers, and there are very many services selling
email address lists of people representing various types of targeted
markets.

Beyond this kind of self-regulation of the Internet, there is an
increasing cry for legal regulation of spam, and this is beginning to
happen. If you run a mailing list server, you should keep abreast of
developments in this area.

A commonly-cited precedent for such legal regulation is the existing
regulation on unsolicited faxes (essentially you can't spam fax
machines - get permission to fax people.) The government claims the
power to regulate faxes because it has the power to regulate the
telephone business, and the definition of a fax machine in this law is
sufficiently broad that it can be argued that any device such as a
computer connected to a modem is a fax machine, and some have argued
that therefore email spam is already illegal. Taking this broad an
interpretation would probably produce mayhem when applied to good and
proper traffic between computers, and most people are instead urging
specific laws to deal with email spam.

This becomes a timely issue because some states are considering such
laws, and one has recently been adopted in Washington. On June 12th,
Washington State enacted a law which penalizes with fines of $500 to
$1000 the transmission of specific kinds of spam email from a computer
in Washington state, or to an email account of a resident of
Washington State. The kind of spam which is prohibited is that in
which the header information is forged (a common practice to avoid
angry retaliation), or in which the subject line is misleading, or
which uses a mail server without permission. Obviously there are some
problems here. For example, one can imagine many arguments over
whether or not a subject line is misleading. Further, the issue arises
how a mailer knows that an address is held by a Washington State
resident.  The law states that you are supposed to know if the
information is available from the the registrant of the domain name
contained in the recipient's email address, but this hardly seems a
practical approach in the real Internet world. We can expect a lot of
litigation before all the kinks are ironed out. The Attorney General
of Washington State has set up a web site
(http://www.wa.gov/wwweb/AGO/junkemail/) to provide information on the
new law. The home page of this site observes: 

        Unsolicited e-mail, sometimes referred to as "spam"  or
        "UCE", is electronic mail which is unsolicited and sent
        for the purpose of selling the recipient goods, services,
        or properties. Commercial UCE advertisements are
        most often used for multi-level marketing schemes,
        get-rich-quick schemes, work-at-home schemes or for
        questionable products or pornography.

To further complicate affairs, this law will undoubtedly generate many
of the unique issues of jurisdiction which the rise of the Internet
has spawned. 

We doubt that many of you will be forging headers or using misleading
subject lines, but undoubtedly various government bodies will be
experimenting increasingly with such regulations, and it will pay to
stay abreast of the issue. We will keep you informed as we hear of
them, and in the meantime the safest course is always to solicit
subscriptions to your mailing list.

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 "Sidereal" is pronounced sy-DEER-ee-all, and means "of
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