Porn spam by law now has to be labeled as such.

Not as if spammers - especially porn spammers - are those that have been known to uphold any laws... Boing Boing reports (via Reuters and AVN) that porn is now Federally mandated to label their e-mail as "Sexually-Explicit:" - presumably so that users can just setup strict filters on that string instead of having to resort to more elaborate measures (said measures are what we normally discuss on here since strict string filtering is fairly useless these days).

There have been other suggestions and movements to do this as well, forcing "ADV:TYPE" into subjects where "TYPE" would be type of ad, and "ADV" would be the warning that it was spam which you were receiving.

I find it highly unlikely that spammers will actually follow through on this - not to mention that it is hard to globally enforce local laws.
If India passed a law that all males had to put "MALE: " at the start of the subjects of their e-mails - would Americans follow this? I would think not.
It is mainly so that they have grounds to more easily prosecute those that are spamming - but I'm not sure that this attempt at a solution is going to help much.
We shall see.

Posted by Eric at April 14, 2004 02:09 PM | TrackBack