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Will changes to email improve safety and fairness?

Article Excerpt
Emerging changes to email carry the promise of abating abuse, but will these changes be effective and ensure fairness? The changes ahead hold both promise and peril. Guided by self-interests, an email address authorization scheme is claimed to be an essential element needed to curtail abuse and thus protect recipients. Guided by similar self interests, the US Federal government also recently codified opting-out and what constitutes spam. Regardless of the rules and mechanisms, keep in mind most of the abusive email is prevented by imposing some type of reputation assessment.

The current practice for protecting email's utility as an efficient form of communication is to ostracize abusive sources when much of their email is sent to recipients that never expressed a desire for its receipt. In the email vernacular, this practice is called block-listing when the source has not adhered to an opt-in criteria for the distribution of bulk email. An opt-in criteria may seem unjust as it imposes differing sending limits. However, an opt-in criteria does provide a practical means to ascertain who is causing the greatest harm to email's utility, and a better method to assess email abuse has not been devised.

CAN-SPAM Law Demonstrates the DMA's Influence

Some marketers advocated a wholly unworkable and unsafe opt-out method that became codified in the US Federal CAN-SPAM law. Fortunately, this law also allows for a practical opt-in criteria to be...

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