Bulk e-Mail Charges Imminent as Spam e-Mail Faces Regulation

02/28/2006

Paul Munnis

As the cost of snail-mail postage stamps increases then Internet e-Mail becomes very attractive at zero cost to senders. For political campaigns free e-Mail has been wonderful. Yet many bulk mailers are jamming end user mailboxes with lots of unwanted junk mail and people are complaining. What’s more the senders don’t care about the end user at all. They are making money on the deal and are stuffing user mail boxes at record rates.

That includes political campaigns who have been trolling for Internet donors. In small local campaigns the mailing list may be only a few hundred people. By the time we get to Senate campaigns it can be hundreds of thousands of people. When multiplied by the number of campaigns then the volume of e-Mail becomes significant to users.

Commercial groups have been saturating e-Mail boxes with ads for drugs, sexual aids, wrist watches, discount hardware and software, etc. The result has been “Spyware,” a form of invasive software that is planted unseen on your computer and that records you areas of Internet interest and then sends directed e-Mail to you e-Mail account as a result.

Computer Hackers called “Phishers” have been using the Spyware technology to grab password and account information and then using it for theft and to enroll people they don’t like into unwanted ad promotion programs thus adding to the volume of e-Mail. The results have been bad for all. The government has not policed much of this except in superficial ways.

That has lead many suppliers of e-Mail accounts, such as AOL, to add junk e-mail filters to filter out the unwanted spam mail. Sometimes wanted e-mail gets filtered out in the process though and that makes for potential liability. At the least an added delay in e-Mail delivery results. When the e-Mail filtering server crashes the e-Mail can become backed up with day’s worth of e-Mail thus amplifying the unintended mail delay. All this makes e-Mail account providers nervous because they mainly offer e-Mail as a convenience.

This has given rise to anti-spam organizations who are putting on the heat with e-Mail providers to allow users to opt out of unwanted e-Mail. They are trying to set standards and to get conformity before the abuses lead to really onerous regulation.

Government has been asked to pass privacy laws and they have not done so. Thus, the private sector e-Mail sites who host group e-Mail are setting bulk mailing fees as a way to regulate the amount of trash mail. When people must pay they become far more considerate.

Many people are angry, including political campaigns that rely upon free e-Mail as an alternative to Post Office fee based stamp purchasing. Sites like moveon.org will be particularly impacted by the consequence to online fund raising that rely on junk e-Mail to reach voters to focus issues that may want them to side with by making a donation.

For local MN House campaigns the results will likely be tolerable but for Federal Senate campaigns the costs will be large to do political fund raising. Some say that for this very reason we can expect the Congress to finally act. It is hurting them as much as it is hurting a large retailer such as WalMart. Of course the inevitable evaluation of who is being hurt the most will then happen with political contention to follow.

More information can be read in the CD-1 blog section where an AP story has been posted.

Our news service has remained free, does not use mass e-Mail to spam user mail boxes and we do not sell our mailing lists to others. We do not even register with search engines although they pick us up from traffic counts. We post fewer and fewer solicitations for money in the Letters to Editors section and we have completely eliminated them for unendorsed candidates. We do not provide nor charge for ads. We are now pondering the question of whether or not we should completely eliminate any commercial aspect from the website and the form that this anti-spam campaign takes will determine our policy. Your privacy has been and will continue to be protected. We use no group e-mail except to receive information from Caucus discussion groups. We use a blacklist to prevent unwanted groups from enrolling on our website. You can always get your letters to the Editor or public service events posted by sending an e-Mail letter to

Letters for funds solicitation of unendorsed candidates will not be posted.