Trends

The good news

Spam is on the decline in the United States. The European Commission has determine four major reasons for this.

1. Action Taken by the ISPs. Responding to their users complaints and generally frustrated with the amount of resources spam wastes, ISPs can control what traffic goes through their mail servers and can set-up rapid reaction mechanisms such as MAPS.
   
   
2. New Laws passed in the United States. Over 20 states have passed anti-spam legislation, some of them allowing individuals to file lawsuits against spammers. With stiff penalties averaging $10 per message, up to $25,000 a day, many smaller operations find this a serious deterrent.
   
   Many of these laws also cover junk faxes as their main provisions require opt­out registries to be set up and opt­out requests to be complied with. They outlaw some of the key features of spam -- the forging of addresses and the doctoring of message headers and subject lines. Some states require the inclusion in the header of a label indicating that the message is an advertisement (ADV) or concerns an adults­only website (ADLT). In one third of the states, spam is defined as "the sending of messages to Internet users without an express prior request on their part".
   
   The European union, where spam is not yet a major problem, is considering an outright ban on all spam after examining the issues the United States has had to deal with.
   
   
3. Action taken by trade associations. The AIM, an autonomous subsidiary of the very powerful Direct Marketer's Association (DMA), has come out strongly and unequivocally against spamming. Based on research that shows the ineffectiveness of UCE by comparison with e­mail marketing based on a prior customer relationship, the AIM has adopted a series of very clear guidelines condemning the kinds of practices engaged in by spammers. The DMA, whose own deliberations are at a less advanced stage, is now offering a stop­list service (e­MPS ­ Electronic Mail Preference Service).
   
   
4. The e­marketing counter­culture. People are simply fed-up with spammers and have grown somewhat resilient against the numerous duplicate advertisements.

The Bad News

The availability of servers, routers and backbones in the near future that can enable a single operator to send out 100 Million e-mails a day. Hypothetically, if 200 companies acquired such equipment, and each used it to its full spamming capacity, then every internet user could face the prospect of receiving 60 pieces of spam per day.