Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce

[Piet Beertema <]

    There are some side effects of anti-spam technical fight.
    One is that Spammers now choose real addresses as sender
    instead of a completly forged one.
    As there is no technical solution to prevent anyone from
    using your e-mail address unless we start a world wide
    PGP or S/MIME deployment, many innocent users have there
    e-mail in black list.
How true. And that's *far* worse than spammers using
fake addresses. We've been bitten by this very hard
a couple of months ago.

    This mean that technical solutions is not efficient, we
    need law to make spam clearly illegal.
Do you have a law in France that makes sending snail
mail spam illegal? If not, then making a law against
electronic e-mail spam may be pretty hard.
Sure enough, I'd love to see spam made illegal, but
I don't want to close my eyes for the side effects,
like the one you described. I also want to make a
clear distinction between unwanted ("real") UCE and
what I would describe as "wanted UCE". Because under
a very strict legal regime even UCE messages sent to
a list of existing customers could count as real UCE.
And in fact that comes down to making categories of
UCE, and consequently extending the idea of an X-UCE
header line to "X-UCE: <category>" or some such. And
that in turn could lead to a new discussion... ;-)


	Piet