After the overwhelming response to the “do-not-call” list put into effect earlier this year to stop unsolicited phone calls, Congress inched ahead on a bill with a similar premise — stop unsolicited e-mail. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, CAN-SPAM for short, was approved by the Senate Oct. 29. It seems just in time, too, after reading in Tuesday’s USA Today spam now makes up more than half of all e-mail, as opposed to just 7 percent in 2001.

According to The Associated Press, the CAN-SPAM Act prohibits spam mailers from disguising their identity by using a false return address or misleading subject lines, pulling addresses from Web sites and requiring e-mails to include a form of opt-out option. In addition, the bill directs the Federal Trade Commission to develop a “do-not-spam” registry. The main opponent of the last part of that act is, once again, the Direct Marketing Association, a trade group consisting of such popular professions as telemarketers and mass e-mailers. The DMA opposed this new list, calling it “a bad idea that is never going to work” — as opposed to the do-not-call list, which seems to be working just fine.

Right now, the House is discussing multiple anti-spam bills. While groups are lobbying against the bills, they have dropped steadfast opposition to any regulation at all. They are “focused on making it as livable as possible,” Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, told USA Today.

By making it livable, they mean putting in exceptions that do the least damage to their industry. Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., says there is a “fundamental fault line” between businesses and consumers. Simply put, businesses want to send spam, and consumers don’t want to receive it. Wilson is a co-sponsor of Green’s bill, which includes a strict definition of spam. “I don’t make a distinction between good spam and bad spam,” she said in the USA Today article.

“Good spam?” That concept is something whose very existence defies the conventions and definitions of logic, much like backless tennis shoes or Diet Sprite. However, there are some businesses out there who claim to fit such a definition — those who tell the truth in the subject line and offer an opt-out link. If they’re out there, though, they are few and far between. I have to agree with Wilson — the only good spam is deleted spam.

Ironically, the federal laws being considered might actually help spammers because current state laws are tougher. A new anti-spam law in California, which will go into effect Jan. 1, is so tough Dan Jaffe, a lobbyist for the Association of National Advertisers, called it “extraordinarily destructive” in USA Today. The Senate bill has been criticized for having too many loopholes for effective enforcement.

In the meantime, in the current War on Spam, progress is mixed. Similar to the idea that you cannot make anything foolproof because fools are ingenious, the race to make a better spam filter is equaled by the race to make spam that avoids those filters. Academic Information Technology’s attempt to regulate spam at Iowa State, for example, only succeeded in flagging my Stat 101 e-mails as junk.

My recently received messages include “Buy* V*iag’ra Cheap” and “^Mon*ey ^b`ack, gu;^ar.ante^e”; I can read it, but my filter can’t. Some mail programs can be “trained” to spot junk like this and send it directly to the trash — but not always. My parents receive 30 to 40 messages a day, and filters can’t stop all of them.

While dealing with spam is much easier than dealing with telemarketers, it’s not always a walk in the park. If you’re not prepared, graphic-laden pornographic spam will fill your program’s window. This can be especially bad in schools or businesses, when teachers, students or employees land upon a message none of them would be interested in seeing, yet is right there in the academic/business setting. Sometimes the school’s servers themselves will be used as a relay for sending spam, which can cause headaches for administrators and students alike as settings are tweaked to stop it.

There might not be anything through Congress against spam yet, but there are good signs elsewhere. The European Union put anti-spam rules into effect Oct. 31, according to an article on the BBC Web site. Under those rules, companies must gain consent before sending e-mails. A case under California’s 1998 anti-spam law resulted in a $2 million fine against PW Marketing in Los Angeles. Reuters reported the company had sent out spam advertising, of all things, on how to send spam.

The California case also illustrates a weakness in anti-spam laws. The convicted company was based in Los Angeles; many spammers have no physical presence in the United States. It is easy for a spammer halfway across the globe, or someone in a random African nation set upon parting Americans from their money, to annoy millions of people. No matter how tough the law is, those overseas spammers are untouchable.

For any anti-spam effort to be truly effective, it’s going to take a worldwide coalition to smoke the spammers out of their holes and the countries that harbor them. (Sound familiar?) When spammers attack, though, the only casualty is productivity.