The Federal Trade Commission will have a three-day spam forum this spring to address the proliferation of unsolicited commercial e-mail and to explore the technical, legal and financial issues associated with it.
The forum, open to the public, will take place April 30-May 2 at the FTC's offices in Washington. The workshop will include panels to address 14 issues associated with spam:
· The daily experience of consumers, filter programmers and ISP abuse department personnel in dealing with spam.
· E-mail address harvesting technology.
· Deceptive routing and subject information in spam.
· Costs and benefits of spam, including costs ISPs spend on filtering, bandwidth and customer service, which are passed on to consumers.
· Security weaknesses such as open relays, open proxies and FormMail scripts in e-mail transfer technology.
· Blacklists.
· Viruses, Web beacons and spyware that may be attached to e-mail.
· Wireless devices, text-based messaging and wireless e-mail.
· Current and proposed spam legislation.
· Enforcement of current and proposed international spam legislation.
· Recent private and governmental spam law enforcement actions.
· Best practices for e-mail senders and receivers.
· Evolving technologies to eliminate or negate spam.
· Structural changes to the way e-mail is sent, including proposals to reverse the cost model of e-mail.
Parties interested in participating should e-mail [email protected] by March 25.
