I did say on Fox that unwanted advertising "is a form of pollution."

Keep up the good work. I wish I could have watched you. ...I'm not familiar with what's going on with CAN SPAM and would like to know what's in it. I do hope that helpful regulations are forthcoming. Aside from the obvious intrusion of people's time and attention, spam e-mail is a serious problem that obstructs the use of private property in a malicious manner, considering the high volume of messages, a volume especially inflated by the 'dictionary' attacks that generates endless repetitions of messages to sequentially invented usernames. (My akp.cc domain even gets e-mail sent to addresses I have never used.) It not only costs users money but also makes e-mail unusable. And so on.

Hey Adrian,
CAN-SPAM's main point is to preempt stronger laws in states like California, Maryland, Vermont, and thirty other states that have spam legislation. It's a opt-out bill, and it gives you no right to sue!

The members have said that it is a strong bill, but if you look at the details, you'll see that this is a very hard bill to use. The FTC called the bill harmful, or useless at best!

This is subtle, but check out this provision:

"PROHIBITION OF DECEPTIVE SUBJECT HEADINGS- It is unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission to a protected computer of a commercial electronic mail message if such person has actual knowledge, or knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances, that a subject heading of the message would be likely to mislead a recipient, acting reasonably under the circumstances, about a material fact regarding the contents or subject matter of the message (consistent with the criteria used in enforcement of section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (15 U.S.C. 45)).

So, the state would have to prove that the sender had actual knowledge that the spam would mislead the recipient. In order to meet that burden, the state would need internal memoranda, or some other type of solid proof that the sender tried to actually mislead the recipient! This type of provision gives spam advertising more immunity from consumer protection law than normal advertising.

I think this is something that congress is trying to do just to make them look good, the bill would do nothing to stop spam, except perhaps make it legal as long as they don't deceive you.