The First Step Toward Getting E-Mail Back The Way It Used to Be

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The First Step Toward Getting E-Mail Back The Way It Used to Be

10/8/2003

By Terry CalhounBy , Joe St Sauver

University of Oregon Computing Center

As a power user of e-mail I send and/or receive somewhere between 600 and 1,000 messages on a typical work day. In today’s guest column, J'e St Sauver’s call for our government to do something rings a bell for me. Yes, it may be a little complicated. The do-not-call list is off and on hold, for example, due to legitimate free speech issues. (As an employee of a 501(c)(3) organization, it would make life difficult for us if we were held to the same standards as commercial organizations, partly because complying means spending money we don’t have – from "profits" we don’t make – on the technology to comply. On the other hand, not holding us to those standards may well constitute an infringement of the commercial speakers’ free speech.) And, even if most spammers are inside the U.S., if they’re making enough money, they could just move away. On the other hand, maybe that cuts into the profit margin just enough. Anyway, an astute candidate for the 2004 presidential election would be paying a lot of attention. I know that if one of the democratic candidates could point to something they had done that had effectively reduced spam, they’d likely have my vote. Heck, if even one admitted they read their own mail and understand the problem, I’d probably even bring out my checkbook!

—Terry Calhoun, IT Trends Commentator, Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), University of Michigan.
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The FTC and Congress appear to have finally grasped the fact that Americans are sick and tired of telemarketing calls, and despite the DMA's desperate legal wranglings and spastically comic efforts to delay or block the Do-Not-Call Bill, the Beltway bureaucracy appears to have finally gotten the message that Americans have *had it* and are just completely fed up with unsolicited telephone sales calls. Good! It's about time!

So why hasn't the FTC and Congress done anything about spam?

I suspect there are a number of factors at work:

1. Congressmen and Senators tend not to be "e-mail people."
If you're a Congressman or Senator, you're an important person and you deal with other important people the same way Congressmen or Senators have always dealt with other important people: face to face, or maybe over the phone.

Consider yourself fortunate if your Congressman or Senator even knows how to send an e-mail himself, because, believe it or not, many of them don't. Heck, most of them don't even have real public e-mail addresses, try sending an e-mail and see what happens. Most likely it will get read (or your subject line will be) by some intern or volunteer for reading, tallying, and offering a boilerplate response!

If you don't use e-mail, and most Congressmen and Senators don't, you might be able to be excused for not knowing how bad things have become.

So do me a favor. If you're the friend of a Congressman or Senator, the next time you're at the country club walking between holes on the golf course, give your friend an ‘attaboy’ for supporting the do-not-call list (since they virtually all did), and then ask "So what about spam?"