Roger Townsend, an attorney with Newman & Newman in Seattle, wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in the December 27, 2002 print edition of the Puget Sound Business Journal in response to an article about spam.

Certain of Mr. Townsend's comments reflect a lack of understanding about the problem.

Mr. Townsend, in his letter:

Already, there are products available that effectively and completely screen e-mails (e.g., http://www.spamarrest.com). . . . for less than $40 a year.

Products like spamarrest do not prevent spam from arriving and being stored in the space you rent on your ISP's mail server. Incoming mail is stored in your rental space on the ISP mail server and spamarrest then pulls all that mail onto its server for processing. So, the spam is being stored on two mail servers, not one. And you are paying to store spam on two mail servers, not one.

Because spamarrest and like products do not stop the spam from coming into the storage space you rent from your ISP, your storage space can still fill up with spam. When your storage space is full, all incoming email will be rejected by your ISP.

Mr. Townsend also fails to realize that his $40 solution is a cost directly to the end user. He also ignores the costs to ISPs to process and store all the spam, which you pay indirectly.

Washington law has more effect on legitimate businesses who are using e-mail as a marketing device than peddlers of unsavory services.

Mr. Townsend is attempting to define spam as unsolicited commercial email from "unsavory sources", so that unsolicited commercial email from "savory sources" is not considered spam. Unsolicited commercial email is spam and spam, by definition, is unsavory.

The article mentions a suit against Washington Mutual claiming $3,530 in damages due to having to delete unwanted e-mails.

Washington Mutual got sued because the money trail from an illegal spam led back to Washington Mutual. Washington Mutual was accused of assisting the illegal activity through financial support of the illegal activity.

Valuable and limited court resources should be used to punish truly bad actors (e.g., consumer scams, child pornographers, etc.), which are already subject to existing laws. Washington's anti-spam statute is an experiment that needs to be abandoned.

Mr. Townsend wrongly concludes that an honest spam takes up less storage space, consumes less bandwidth, requires less time to deal with, than porn spams or consumer scam spams. If businesses acted ethically and stored their advertising on mail servers with the permission of the owner/renter -- using opt-in procedures -- then there would be no need for statutes.

Mr. Townsend is correct that the current law needs to be abandoned. The law should be replaced with a law similar to the anti-junk fax law that requires permission to consume our resources.