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Senate Passes Anti-Spam Bill

The Senate voted today 97-0 to restrict E-Mail spam:

It targets the most unsavory senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail by prohibiting messages that peddle financial scams, fraudulent body-enhancement products and pornography. The legislation also draws on amendments from Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) that would criminalize the techniques used by spammers to thwart detection -- disguising identities, masking the locations of computers used to send junk e-mail and automating spam attacks.

The bill has its critics:

...several anti-spam and consumer groups have argued that the bill has too many loopholes that could enable so-called legitimate marketers to bombard consumers with unwanted e-mail.

The bill would preempt all state anti-spam laws, some of which are tougher than the Burns-Wyden bill. And it would prohibit private lawsuits against spammers, allowing suits only by providers of e-mail accounts, such as Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., EarthLink Inc. and America Online Inc., all of which also market to their own members.

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