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| George W Bush is expected to sign the CAN-SPAM
act on 1 January 2004 |
The US Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act on Monday 8 December,
which is expected to be signed into law by President Bush and take
effect on 1 January 2004.
While end-user frustration with spam is at an all time high,
many members of the email community including Sophos, a world
leader in protecting businesses against viruses and spam, believe
that the legislation has the potential to create confusion and
encourage even more companies to send unsolicited emails.
The bill, known as CAN-SPAM ("Controlling the Assault of
Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing") proposes an 'opt-out'
standard rather than the more vigorous "opt-in" process proposed by
anti-spam experts such as Sophos.
"There is no indication that the CAN-SPAM Act will actually
reduce the number of unwanted messages received by email users,
particularly given the difficulty of tracking spammers and thus
enforcing the legislation," said Jesse Dougherty, director of
anti-spam development at Sophos. "The 'opt-out' provision actually
stands to increase the number of unwanted messages received by
email users because it essentially permits senders to legitimately
send unsolicited commercial email as long as they provide
recipients with a way to "opt-out" of future correspondence."
Under the terms of the proposed law, certain forms of spam will
be legal. The bill states that spammers may send as many
"commercial electronic mail messages" as they wish - provided that
the messages are obviously advertisements with a valid US postal
address, and an unsubscribe link is present at the bottom. It would
then be the responsibility of every individual to unsubscribe from
any mailing list they did not wish to receive spam from, rather
than only legalising email from mailing lists to which users have
explicitly chosen to "opt-in".
Sophos recommends companies protect themselves with a consolidated solution which can defend
businesses from the threats of both spam and viruses.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.