Send spammers to jail, US lawmakers say

E-mail "spammers" who flood Internet inboxes with millions of unwanted, deceptive commercial pitches should face jail time as well as financial penalties, according to US lawmakers and law enforcers.

But some said a proposed anti-spam bill, which has won the backing of top lawmakers, would do little to stop the flood of unwanted commercial pitches, as companies would still be free to send offers to anybody with an e-mail address.

Get-rich-quick schemes, pornography and other dubious pitches now account for between 40 percent and 80 percent of all e-mail, filtering companies and Internet providers say, and Congress is widely expected to pass an anti-spam bill this year.

The leading bill in the House of Representatives would require Internet marketers to disclose their online and offline addresses, and honour customer requests to be taken off their mailing lists, an approach backed by business groups that want to differentiate "legitimate" marketing from the two-thirds of spam that contains fraudulent information of some kind.

The bill also won praise from law-enforcement officials, who said spammers who now shrug off civil penalties as a cost of doing business may think twice when faced with a jail sentence of up to two years.

"We believe criminal sanctions will make a big difference in Virginia," Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore told the House subcommittee on crime.

William Moschella, an assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice, said he supported the bill as well.

Others said the bill would not give consumers enough power over their inboxes because companies would still be free to send them e-mail pitches until they were told to stop.

This "opt-out" approach could prove counterproductive as spammers commonly use opt-out requests to confirm that an e-mail address is valid, leading to more spam, said Chris Murray, legislative counsel at Consumers Union.