• by Paul Gough , January 2, 2004

A day after the first federal law to address spam took effect Thursday, few are under the illusion that the problem of annoying or malicious email is going to be solved immediately.

In the annals of the interactive industry, 2003 will be remembered as the year the federal government got serious about tackling spam. A bipartisan effort in both houses of Congress led to the so-called Can-Spam Act, which was enthusiastically signed by President Bush. It supersedes dozens of efforts at the local and state level, most notably a stringent anti-spam law in California and a law in Virginia that led to the arrests of two North Carolina men a few weeks ago on charges that they carried out a spam campaign. But in the opinion of several interactive experts, Can-Spam falls short of, well, canning spam.

"I think it's half useful and half show, really 50-50 there," said David Hallerman, senior analyst at New York-based eMarketer. Hallerman and others think that it may have an effect on domestically sent spam, but a large part will end up going out of the country, just like online gambling did. But Hallerman said he hopes the federal government will back up its words with action.

"There's a lot of attention paid to it now because the law's being passed, but one of my concerns since it's a federal law is how much backing on a financial level will be paid to it," Hallerman said. "A law without enough money to enforce it can be toothless."

Will legitimate marketers - who, after all, aren't the target of the Can-Spam Act - have trouble living up to the standards set forth in the law? Probably not, said Bennie Smith, chief privacy officer at DoubleClick. "For legitimate marketers who have always seen the benefits [of adhering to best practices], I don't think there's going to be a big change after Jan. 1," Smith said. He thinks that, if anything, the Can-Spam Act sets standards of behavior for email marketers to follow. And Smith thinks it's what legitimate marketers have practiced.

"We've spent a lot of time over the last year, and the last six months, talking with clients about how to think about email and how it's going to be shaped by external forces," Smith said. But he said that legitimate marketers should think of email tactically, approaching it as a valuable channel, but one that must be targeted to the customer's needs and not sent just because it's relatively cheap and easy.

Brian Niles, chief executive of Bristol, Pa.-based Targetx, also thinks the effect on legitimate marketers will be minimal: They're not spamming. He thinks that the companies that use rented lists will have to do a little adjusting. But he also doesn't think that spam will disappear overnight.

"No spammer is going to go to a do-not-email list," he notes. He said that legitimate email marketers were concerned that the federal law would be a headache for them, considering that some viewed the California spam law as going overboard.

Hallerman said the Can-Spam act would act as an encouragement for legitimate marketers to be more careful, and to clean up their lists and optimize them. He said that email marketing creates a sense of intimacy, and that it can work.

Many believe that legislation represents only one part of the solution to spam. Others include continuing to work on best practices - something that trade groups and others in the industry have been working on, particularly in the last year - and by the technology that filters out spam and delivers only useful email to a recipient's inbox. Targetx's Niles said that no law or filter would solve the spam problem: It's going to take a fundamental change in the Internet.

"The only way to solve this is a technological change. But that's moving a mountain, changing the way we work on the Internet," Niles said. "We have an Internet that's built on trust, that was built in the 1980s, not even thinking that people would use it this way. That's got to change." He said it involves changing servers, using next-generation authentication of users and senders. Only when the big movers on the Internet pool their energies to create a better email will spammers be unable to evade detection.

"Once we do that, spammers can't hide. We'll know who they are," Niles said.