Dear No Spam: Your ignorance precedes you like a plague of locusts. When will you ever learn? It is not about the intent of electronic mail, nor is it about headers, nor is it about subject lines. CAN-SPAM is an act of Congress and as such can be expected to be silly, capricious, incomplete, and open to interpretation.

While we are on the subject of spam, let me take an aside. One of our developers took a little trip to Hawaii over the holidays. As we all know, Hawaii is the SPAM capital of the worldthat is, SPAM consumption capital. Apparently, the U.S. military left boatloads of the stuff there during and after World War II, and everyone ended up eating it. You even can get a SPAM McMuffin at Mickey Ds. Anyway, this guy brought back some specialty SPAM for our pleasure. So, in addition to Classic SPAM (yes, it really is called classic), we have been feasting on Hickory Smoked SPAM, Hot & Spicy SPAM, SPAM with less sodium, SPAM oven-roasted turkey, and my personal favorite, SPAM Lite.

Back to spam (without the ). The Federal Trade Commission dropped the hammer on the second half of CAN-SPAM with a new ruling on Dec. 16, 2004. Most of the ruling deals with what is and what is not commercial electronic e-mail. And we can dance around that all day long. The fact is if you are offering a product for sale via an e-mail, it is a commercial electronic e-mail. Fine, we can deal with thatexcept for one little provision. I quote from page three of the official document. (You can get the entire 81-page document at http://www.ftc.gov/os/2004/12/041216canspamfrn.pdf.)

In enacting the CAN-SPAM Act, Congress made the following determinations of public policy, set forth in section 7701(b) of the Act: (1) there is a substantial government interest in regulation of commercial electronic mail on a nationwide basis; (2) senders of commercial electronic mail should not mislead recipients as to the source or content of such mail; and (3) recipients of commercial electronic mail have a right to decline to receive additional commercial electronic mail from the same source.

Read the last determination once again: recipients of commercial electronic mail have a right to decline to receive additional commercial electronic e-mail from the same source. I interpret that to mean the required opt mechanism must provide an opt-out not only for that particular piece of e-mail but for all commercial e-mail from the same source. OK, you are the CIO of a really big insurance company with thousands of employees, many of whom are scattered across the country. The domain you commonly use for e-mail communication is reallygreatinsurance.com. The enterprise sends thousands upon thousands of e-mails daily. Some of those e-mails are opt-in newsletters, and some are shameless enticements to purchase some of your products or services. Can you truly guarantee your opt-out mechanism will prevent John Q. Public from ever again receiving any additional commercial e-mail from reallygreatinsurance.com? Oh, yeah. How are you going to go about enforcing that? Not easily done.

Remember back when I talked about interpretation? Theres the rub. We all know it was not the intent of the Congress to go after insurance companies when it passed CAN-SPAM. But remember the intent doesnt matter. What matters is the interpretation, and if the FTC and then the federal courts decide reallygreatinsurance.com has an opt-out mechanism that does not meet the letter of the law, then we have trouble in River City. And you had better start paying more attention to those FTC rulings.

Feel free to e-mail Dr. Gigabyte with your problems at [email protected]. If he cant provide an answer, it probably isnt a real problem. Dr. G. does not deal with delusional personality disorders.