Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

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Home 28 Aug 2005 Maybe the IETF won't publish SPF and Sender-ID as experimental RFCs after all Email Yesterday, the IESG, the group that approves RFCs for publication received an appeal from Julian Mehnle to not to publish the Sender-ID spec as an experimental RFC due to technical defects. IESG members' responses were sympathetic to his concerns, so I'd say that a Sender-ID RFC has hit a roadblock. See more ... posted at: 00:17 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/notspfrfc.trackback 24 Aug 2005 How not to protect children from pornography Email Sending pornography to children is really bad, right? Then making it illegal to e-mail porn to children is a great idea, right? Nope. An article in USA Today describes the perverse effects of new laws in Michigan and Utah. Both laws make it illegal to send ads to minors for things that minors aren't allowed to buy, with serious legal penalties if you do. Both have established opt-out lists on which parents can list addresses used by their children, and mailers can pay to have their lists scrubbed against the opt-out lists. Both states use a new scrubbing service run by Unspam, LLC, run by Matthew Prince who also runs the interesting Project Honeypot. The scrubbing service's website is coy about the cost of scrubbing, but the Utah regulations prescribe a fee of 1/2 cent per address and Michigan allows up to 3 cents per address. Even 1/2 cent is a significant tax on senders, and 3 cents/address is probably more than the entire cost of sending a large email campaign. Both state laws say you have to scrub and pay the ``email tax'' every 30 days to keep your lists clear of opted out addresses. See more ... posted at: 23:58 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/utahmich.trackback 16 Aug 2005 Snooping on e-mail is still against the law, just barely Email In August 2005, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit issued its long awaited decision in the U.S. v. Councilman case. This case has an extremely peculiar set of facts and a peculiar history to match, and although I agree with the court's decision, I'm not too encouraged by the history of the case. Everyone apparently agreed to the facts of the case, but see the update at the end of this article: Brad Councilman was an executive at a company called Interloc which ran an online service for used bookstores, which among other things provided the stores with e-mail accounts. (Interloc is long gone, merged into the larger Alibris.) In 1998 Councilman allegedly decided to do a little surrepetitious market research by adjusting the procmail script that delivered the stores' e-mail to make copies of mail from Amazon.com in a mailbox that Councilman and other Interloc employees read, and they did indeed copy and read thousands of messages. Councilman was in the unusual position of being both an ISP for these stores and their competitor. In 2001, Councilman was indicted for violating the Wiretap Act, by intercepting electronic communications, namely the e-mail from Amazon. Councilman's lawyers came up with a clever defense arguing that what he did wasn't against the law. See more ... posted at: 02:57 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/councilman.trackback

Topics Copyright Law - 9 Email - 128 ICANN - 63 Money - 1 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs Spam resource (Al Iverson) The Spam Diaries (Ed Falk) Word to the Wise (Laura Atkins) Related sites IRTF Anti-Spam Research Group Network Abuse Clearinghouse Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

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