The Hoboken Cafe 

So the Government has finally passed an anti spam law. The other day I was in on a conference call with about 300 companies where some of the lawmakers were explaining the details of the new law.

Basicly, it's designed to go after the worst offenders by making it illegal to send mail that fake header addresses, are deceptive about the sender and basicly do the things that spammers do to get around spam filters. Mailing lists must have an opt out feature. One very interesting note is that the law will hold pretty much anyone involved liable. So if you hire someone else to send spam for you (even someone in another country) to advertise your product and that company does not follow the rules, YOU will be held responsible. The penalities include lots of fines (money for each offense!) and up to five years in jail. And spidering the web to harvest email addresses or doing dictionary attacks to garner addresses will result in triple fines. This is cool as I actually had to change this site so that email addresses are not displayed because of all the email harvesting engines that spider it.

The law goes into effect Jan 1st. but don't expect any big changes soon. It is, however, a good step foward. Over half of all email sent today is spam.

-Mike