If you have an e-mail account, you’ve experienced spam, or “unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE).” It’s hard to avoid being the target of e-mail marketers, who harvest your e-mail address in any number of ways. And if you have a Web site, as I do, spammers can gather the e-mail addresses you post on the page and include them in their mass appeals.

On any given day, I may receive twenty-five to fifty e-mails, with probably thirty percent of them being UCE. I’ve noticed that lately spammers are getting more creative by adding subject lines such as “Re: Your phone message.” When you look at the e-mail, its contents have nothing to do with a phone message, but might instead be for University Diploma or Benchmark Print Supply. If you try to remove yourself from the mailings using the directions contained in the e-mail, the e-mail typically bounces.

So what’s a person to do? The Federal Trade Commission publishes an e-mail address to which you can send complaints about UCE: uce@ftc.gov. On its Web site, the FTC has a number of articles on topics that pertain to offers received via e-mail. One in particular, “Unsolicited Mail, Telemarketing, and Email: Where to Go to ‘Just Say No,’” discusses options people have for opting out of unsolicited mailings, both online and snail mail. For instance, you can write to the three major credit bureaus and ask them not to share personal information about you, which can help cut down on unsolicited credit offers.

The article also discusses the Direct Marketing Association’s new Email Preference Service where you can request to have up to three e-mail addresses added to the remove list. Organizations that are members of DMA have to abide by the request and remove your e-mail addresses. Once you’ve submitted your addresses, you should eventually see a decrease in the amount of UCE. This will hopefully be more effective than trying to follow the removal instructions on a spam e-mail.

The news gets better, though. On 18 July 2000, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 3113, “the Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2000.” The bill now goes to the Senate, where a compromise will be reached with several bills on the same topic there. According to CAUCE News, Vol. 4, No. 1, July 2000, HR 3113 includes the following provisions:

• Providers of Internet access service can set their own UCE policy (including “no UCE at all”), and so long as it is properly published, senders must obey it.
  
• ISPs and recipients of mail sent in violation can sue for $500 per spam, just like recipients of junk faxes.
  
• The FTC can cite and fine violators.
  
• UCE (unsolicited or otherwise) must have a working return address to tell them to stop.
  
• Forged headers on UCE are illegal.
  
• Senders of UCE must stop when you tell them to.

CAUCE, or the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail, has been active in the fight against UCE for several years. Its Web site contains pending legislation, a petition against UCE, a link to a Spam Recycle Center, and “True Tales of Spam.” The latter includes an article about an event several years ago that shut down a number of genealogy surname lists when the mailing list exchange was bombarded with spam from Benchmark Print Supply.

The good news is that you can do something about spam. I’ve submitted my e-mail addresses to the DMA Web site listed above, and time will tell if the tool is effective or not. I do know that I have sent requests to DMA in the past to have my name and address removed from direct mail and telemarketing lists, and the mail and calls slowed as a result. The problem is that you have to renew these requests—nothing lasts forever. Perhaps the threat of the pending legislation will help the issue, but until the legislation is signed into law and the law is enforced, spammers have nothing to worry about. Maybe your senators need to hear from you if you want to see this legislation become a reality.

Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing, editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists’ newsletter OnBoard, the creator of Clooz—the electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, and a frequent contributor to Ancestry Magazine. She can be reached via e-mail at liz@ancestordetective.com or at gceditor@ancestry.com.