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DNE and Mail
This page considers suggestions for national and global
Do Not Email (DNE) registry schemes. It also covers Do
Not Mail schemes
It covers -
It
supplements discussion elsewhere on this site regarding
Australian and overseas
spam restrictions and email marketing.
introduction
Bureaucrats, pundits and politicians in search of a quick
fix have recurrently proposed the notion of a Do Not Email
registry that would complement Do Not Call registries.
A DNE registry, generally envisaged as operating under
government auspices but industry funded, would comprise
a database of email addresses to which particular mail
should not be sent. Some proposals envisage that the database
would contain additional information.
The expectation is that marketers - directly or through
a facilitator such as a bulk email facilitation service
- would access the registry, compare the list/s in the
registry and then edit their own list to delete matched
addresses.
Deletion might be absolute or might be for particular
classes of products/services, with for example restrictions
on some mailouts to children.
That 'scrubbing' (ie comparison and editing) would involve
mailers gaining a list of 'live' addresses, ie email addresses
that are actually used by potential recipients and are
considered by recipients as sufficiently significant for
inclusion on the list.
developments
Moves towards development of DNEs have been small-scale
and hesitant.
In the US for example the controversial Utah state Child
Protection Registry Act of 2006 sought to establish
a DNE featuring email addresses that belong to minors.
The Act requires email marketers to scrub their lists
against the registry. Access to the registry by those
marketers would be on a commercial basis. The legislation
aims to protect minors from receiving email that promotes
products or services that cannot be lawfully sold to them
or that contain material "harmful to minors".
It features sanctions regarding any senders that do not
comply.
issues
Would a DNE registry scheme work?
Critics typically comment that key issues are -
- non-compliance
by spammers, who would simply ignore the registry and
in some cases send mail from other jurisdictions
- spoofing
- sender address fraud - through exploitation of inadequacies
in the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), with senders
of illicit messages being able to disguise the origin
of the message and thereby subvert the Do Not Email
registry.
- the
cost of developing and maintaining a DNE Registry, often
characterised as "prohibitively expensive".
US critics for example warn that it would "potentially
run into hundreds of millions of dollars" and that
there would be daily access by several hundred thousand
users to over 500 million email addresses within two
years.
- a
DNE registry would represent an unacceptable single
point of failure to legitimate businesses that would
need to rely on the system and would "immediately
become one of the most visible and coveted targets for
spammers and hackers, given that it would represent
the richest source of 'live' email addresses ever created".
Other
critics argue that a DNE is unnecessary, given -
- penalties
in the Australian Spam Act and comparable overseas legislation
such as the CAN-Spam Act in the US
- consumer
and ISP self-help (eg filtering at the desktop and service
provider levels)
- use
of email blacklists
- the
emergence of what are claimed to be viable technological
measures such as Sender ID.
That
has provoked responses such as scepticism about the technological
and commercial viability of particular technological measures.
uptake
There has been little response to DNE proposals outside
the US, where calls for establishment of Do Not Email
registries have been opposed by bodies such as the E-Mail
Sender & Provider Coalition (ESPC),
IAB, Electronic Frontier Foundation and privacy seal
operator TRUSTe.
The ESPC, established by the Network Advertising Initiative
(NAI) and serving as apologists for email marketers and
facilitators, for example recurrently comments that a
DNE registry will -
-
not materially reduce the amount of spam plaguing consumers
-
burden senders of "legitimate email"
-
be impossible to enforce because of technological challenges
- be
prohibitively expensive
- be
"difficult to secure"
- impede
the growth of e-commerce
- confuse
consumers
-
provide a "rich source of valid email addresses
for spammers and hackers to target".
The
organisation's criticisms (PDF)
have been broadly endorsed by the American Advertising
Federation, American Association of Advertising Agencies,
Association of National Advertisers, Electronic Frontier
Foundation and the Center for Democracy & Technology.
TRUSTe and the ESPC claim that
A
DNE Registry is a solution that, at best, would be ignored
by spammers. At worst, a DNE Registry could cost the
marketplace billions of dollars and expose vast numbers
of email addresses to more spam. Put simply, a DNE Registry
would be ineffective in reducing the amount of spam
in consumers' inboxes.
They
note that were a DNE registry to be developed and breached
the
email addresses within the Registry would have no protection
and would be freely shared and circulated amongst spammers
- resulting in even more spam for the registrants.
Once these addresses are in the marketplace, the Registry
would be immediately deemed ineffective, and potentially
every registrant would need to change their email address.
Do Not mail
Governments in Australia and elsewhere have not established
'do not mail' registers, although some national direct
marketing organisations such as ADMA operate private schemes
of varying comprehensiveness.
It has been estimated that around 9 billion items of junk
mail (supposedly over 1,000 items per household) are received
in Australia each year. Most of that letterbox litter
is unaddressed. In the US the Direct Marketing Association
estimated that marketers will spend around US$56 billion
on direct mail and catalogues in 2007 (some 26 items of
mail per week for each household), generating an estimated
US$700 billion in sales.
The ADMA national Do Not Mail database supposedly featured
some 222,000 individuals as of mid-2005, with critics
commenting that the list would be significantly higher
if more people were aware of the database.
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