EuroCAUCE - Fighting European Spam

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EuroCAUCE FAQ

Version 1.1 (Beebit 1998-07-01)

 

  1. Hvem eller hva?
  2. Har det noe å gjøre med de som prøver å få til lover mot spam i U.S.A.?
  3. OK, hva er det som er så forskjellig?
  4. Hva har det her med email å gjøre?
  5. Hva er problemet?
  6. Men er ikke reklamemail det samme som...?
  7. Det er veldig få besøkende på hjemmesiden min, og jeg trenger å reklamere for den.
  8. Kan jeg ikke bare slette eller filtrere ut mail jeg ikke vil ha?
  9. Men det er jo bare en liten e-mail?
  10. Hvorfor bruker dere så mye tid på dette her?
  11. Er ikke ikke-kommersiell spam like irriterende som kommersiel?
  12. Hva med yttringsfriheten?
  13. Hvordan fikk de min addresse?
  14. Hva med disse "12 Million Email Addresses!" CDene som en leser om hele tida?
  15. Hvordan kan jeg få tak i skikkelige e-mail addresser?

 

 

Spm. Hvem eller hva?

S. The European Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.

 

Spm2. Har det noe å gjøre med de som prøver å få til lover mot spam i U.S.A.?

S. Vår inspirasjon kommer fra det amerikanske CAUCE, og vi har fått uvurdelig hjelp fra dem i oppstartsfasen. Våre gjøremål er ganske forskjellige, fordi kampen i Europa kommer til å bli annerledes enn kampen på andre siden av Atlanterhavet.

 

Spm3. OK, hva er det som er så forskjellig?

S. Til å begynne med, statenes oppbygning er helt forskjellig. USAs grunnlov gir noen fullmakter (utenriks, handel mellom statene) til den føderale regjeringen. Den Europeiske Union er satt sammen av noen nasjonal-stater, som i følge Roma-traktaten, har avgitt suverenitet i noen saker, slik som handel. Det er i tillegg land som Norge, Island og Sveits som ikke er medlemmer av EU, og som for øyeblikket heller ikke har planer om å bli det. Selv om noen EU-direktiver kan "overstyre" disse landenes lov ( i hht. EØS-avtalen), har disse landene ikke avgitt suverenitet.

Litt mer praktisk, betyr dette at USA's kongress kan lage lover som den føderale regjeringen forventes å sette ut i livet. Europeisk "lovgivning", tar form som direktiver, foreslått av Europakommisjonen, forandret av Europaparlamentet, og videre forandret og godtatt av Ministerrådet. Disse direktivene er ikke "lover", men de er retningslinjer for nasjonal lovgivning i medlemslandene. Europakommisjonens jobb er å sjekke denne prosessen, og gi tilbakemelding til Europaparlamentet om implementasjonen av direktivene.

Du kan lese mer om EUs syringsorganer på http://europa.eu.int/

En annen ting ved Europas voksende inbyrdes markes, er oppdeling av reklame grunnet språkforskjeller. Det er liten vits med reklame på fransk i Norge, det er like liten vits med reklame på norsk i Spania.

 

Spm4. Hva har det her med email å gjøre?

S. CAUCE arbeider med et tilleg til "Title 47, United States Code, Section 227", som ville utvide forbudet mot uoppfordret reklame med faks til å også gjelde e-mail. I EU, har et direktiv blitt satt ut i livet den 20 mai, 1997, som gjelder quot;Distance Contracts". http://europa.eu.int:80/comm/dg24/policy/developments/dist_sell/dist01_en.html

Det som er av interesse her, er artikkel 10 som sier:-

Artikkel 10

Restriksjoner på bruk av langdistanse kontakt

1. Selgere som til forbrukere bruker: - et automatisk utsendingssystem som ikke trenger menneskelig intervensjon (automatisk utsendings maskin), - (fax).

2. Medlemslandene skal forsikre seg om at langdistanse kommunikssjon, untatt det somer nevnt i paragraf 1, som muliggjør individuell kommunikasjon bare skal kunne bli brukt når forbukeren ikke har noen innvendinger.

E-mail har blitt ekskludert fra den kategorien der automatiske systemer får lov til å kontakte mennesker, og deres maskiner med begrenset kapasitet. Artikkel 14 legger heldigvis opp til at medlemsland kan bruke en mer streng lovgivning for å beskytte forbrukeren. Det er ønskelig, selv om det er litt sent, å jobbe for en mer restriktiv "opt-in" løsning for e-mail i hvert medlemsland, når lovgivning for dette direktivet innføres.

Det er et annet direktiv som omhandler personlige data og personvern når det gjelder telekommunikasjon, "DIRECTIVE 97/66/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 15 December 1997, "http://www2.echo.lu/legal/en/dataprot/protection.html

 

Spm5. Hva er problemet??

S. I motsetning til alle andre media så betaler mottakeren mesteparten av kostnadene forbundet med å sende e-mail. Når en utveksler mail med en en-til-en basis, deler sender og mottaker kostadene omtrent likt, men med massesendt mail så betaler senderen fortsatt bare for en mail, selv om den kan hundredoblet. Lagringskostnader er også med i spillet her: for at en skal kunne motta e-post uten å være logget in hele tiden bruker men POP-protokollen som gjør at meldinger kan (midlertidig) lagres i en "postkasse", til de blir hentet. Kostnadene ved dette betaler kunden som en del av abbonementsprisen.

Med fakssystemer, betaler senderen kun telefonregningen, mens mottakeren betaler papir, blekk og toner. Det å motta mange hundre uønskede fakser kan være kjedelig. Papir koster, blekk og toner koster, og en foretningsperson kan komme inn på kontoret en mandag morgen og lure på hvor mange kundeforespørsler som gikk tapt mens gulvet ble dekket av ubrukelig reklame og faksen lyser som et juletre. "War dialers" (automatiske systemer for å spille av en innspilt melding til mottakere, en etter en) er ikke menneskelig. Det at det er ønskelig å begrense begge former for kummunikasjon, skulle ikke være en overraskelse.

In an environment where often the newly-privatised successors of the telecommunications departments of various Post Offices have inherited the monopoly, whilst renouncing the "public service" ethos, of their predecessors (and having acquired a certain rapacity from the time immediately prior to privatisation when rate increases over and above inflation were often allowed in order to make these enterprises more attractive to potential investors), it stands to reason that telecommunications are relatively expensive and will continue to be so for the forseeable future. Given the background of higher telecommunications charges coupled with language barriers, it is not too surprising that a "junk fax" or a "war dialer" industry has yet to emerge on this side of "the pond". The costs of reaching a sufficient number of potential customers by these methods are simply prohibitive.

With email, the possibility exists of maintaining only local connections, and letting the Internet ensure that the message is delivered eventually. A sender in Alicante can quite happily broadcast messages to subscribers from Athens to Aberdeen, all of whom will have to pay telecommunications charges to receive such missives. Here the marginal costs to the sender are negligible and if a message should be inappropriate in language or content, it simply doesn't matter. The Portuguese who does not understand a message in Danish for super offer of little interest to anyone south of Padborg would be expected to simply delete the message and leave it at that, even though the same message cost money to receive. The messages themselves get bigger, sometimes being loaded with graphics or HTML. The latest wheeze is the inclusion of special scripts which, invoked by a browser-based mail handler, automatically go to a Web page, whose content, more often than not, is not generally seen as acceptable for children. The only limiting factor at present is the low number of subscribers. A survey in Germany not so long ago indicated that 78% of people had never heard of the Internet, nor did they know what it was.

 

Q6. But isn't advertising email the same as...?

A. No. Advertisements sent by post are paid for by the sender. It can be argued what kind of postal traffic subsidises another kind but the common factor is that the sender pays, and therefore tries to ensure that the mail is sent to potential customers. Broadcast media likewise: the advertiser pays. The cover prices of most printed publications go toward the distribution costs, and the rest of the costs are borne by advertisers. There is a "self-limiting" factor which always operates here: where advertisers pay costs, they (naturally) try to ensure that their message goes out only to those able and willing to buy the merchandise offered.

The factors tending towards "self-regulation", i.e. cost and diminishing probabilities of sales with distance, hardly apply with email.

 

Q7. I'm getting very few "hits" on my Web site, so I need to advertise it more widely.

A. Unsolicited Bulk or Commercial Email is not the way. There are far better and more effective ways of increasing traffic to your Web site, see http://www.activenet-marketing.co.uk/ and visit the Site Doctor's surgery.

 

Q8. But surely, you can just delete or filter the email you don't want?

A. What we do with our mail once we've received it is our business. Most filters work after the email has been downloaded from the server, that is after it has been paid for. "Server-level" filters are not as widespread, and even their operation uses connect time. Even if the Internet service is 'flat-rate', telecommunication charges are often incurred as a function of time. Good filters do not maintain themselves, either, and their maintenance costs time, and effort, which can translate to money.

 

Q9. Come now, it's only one little email?

A. Advertising emails vary in size from "two-lines" promoting a Web site to the equivalent of three or four A4 pages. Increasingly, other "enhancements" are added which places a greater burden on resources. One snowflake is of no significance, but many make a traffic-stopping, house-burying blizzard.

 

Q10. So why are you people wasting your connection and personal time with this?

A. We consider it an investment: a stitch in time which saves nine, an ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure.

 

Q11. Isn't non-commercial broadcast email just as annoying as the commercial kind?

A. Yes, but there isn't the same "driving force" as with commercial communications. These latter are expected to finance themselves out of increased turnover, and a commercial organisation would have resources that a political or charity organisation would not. However, the low cost to the sender of email can be very tempting to charities and other organisations which would seek to persuade people to donate money or give their votes. It will be our task to convince them of the inadvisability of choosing a medium by which they would only annoy the very people they seek to influence.

Q12. What about Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, and so on?

A. A founding principle of the Council of Europe and the European Community (now Union) is freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. However, the "freedom to be left alone" is another cornerstone of European liberty and democracy. From Germany's Basic Law:

    §1 (1) Human dignity is inviolable. To respect and protect it is the duty of all state authority.

    §2 (1) Everyone has the right to free development of his personality insofar as he does not violate the rights of others or offend against the constitutional order or against morality.

Principles such as these are equally enshrined in the European Convention for Human Rights, as mentioned in these points taken from paragraph (17) of the preamble to the "Distance Contracts" Directive:-

  • the principles set out in Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950 apply;
  • the consumer's right to privacy, particularly as regards freedom from certain particularly intrusive means of communication, should be recognised;
  • specific limits on the use of such means should therefore be stipulated;
  • Member States should take appropriate measures to protect effectively those consumers, who do not wish to be contacted through certain means of communication, against such contacts, without prejudice to the particular safeguards available to the consumer under Community legislation concerning the protection of personal data and privacy;

In a similar vein, Germany's Law on Unfair Competition starts off with,

    §1 Whoever in the course of business competition institutes practices which offend against good manners can be enjoined to cease and desist or to pay damages.

It can be seen that the "in your face" kind of promotion does not get a sympathetic reception in Europe. We at EuroCAUCE feel that we are working entirely "with the grain" in maintaining and furthering acceptable business practice with regard to the use of email.

Q13. How did they get my address?

A. As a result of almost any net.participation: maintaining a Web page, posting to Usenet, participating in IRC and other "chat" fora. There are many automated systems for "harvesting" these addresses. One of the most heavily "harvested" Usenet newsgroups is news.admin.net-abuse.email - which means that UCE gets sent to those people who have the motivation and the means to see to it that senders' accounts get cancelled and their websites closed.

Even Web surfers can be vulnerable to address harvesting. One trick is to set up an FTP transfer where the email address is sent as the FTP password. This can be avoided by disabling the automatic sending of the email address as an FTP password. Another trick involves the usage of JavaScript, and the risk of one's address being gathered can be minimised by disabling JavaScript by default and only enabling it when visiting particular trusted sites.

Run a security check on your browser from here.

Q14. What of those "12 Million Email Addresses!" CDs one keeps reading about?

A. A lot of those addresses are, simply put, no good. They are for accounts which are no longer active or completely nonexistent. Very often people alter or "mung" their addresses when participating in newsgroups or chat fora, which means that the gathered address will not be valid. Note further that these collections of addresses are not even a good representative sample of all net.participants, either. There are many, many people who simply surf the Web, never giving out their email addresses to anyone except close friends and relatives.

Q15. How can I get hold of reliable email addresses?

A. By gathering them yourself, from people who have clearly indicated that they want to get email from you. There may not be as many, but, unlike the "scatter-gun" approach, they are all potential leads.