Texas anti-spam law takes effect Sept. 1
Houston, Chronicle - Associated Press

FORT WORTH -- "A state law designed to regulate and limit unwanted e-mail takes effect Sept. 1, but experts say the law will be hard to enforce and won't do much to slow the spread of spam.

Under the new law, it will be illegal in Texas to send unsolicited e-mail that uses misleading subject lines or offers unlabeled obscene material. The law also requires mass e-mailers to remove names from their lists within three days of being notified.

Unsolicited advertising must carry the note "ADV:" in its subject line, and messages with sexual material must say "ADV: Adult Advertisement." Backers of the law hope those notes will help Internet service providers and spam-filtering software remove spam before it gets to recipients.

Violators can be fined $10 for each mislabeled, unsolicited e-mail message, up to $25,000 per day.

"The bill has some teeth in it," said Tom Kelley, a spokesman for the Texas attorney general's office. "We will be taking action to open investigations and file civil and criminal enforcement actions to get compliance."

Texas joins 33 other states in passing legislation to curb unwanted e-mails, but it's unclear whether the laws will do much good, said Chip Rosenthal, director of EFF-Austin, a technology policy group.

"It creates a bit of a hammer for the Internet providers and the attorney general," Rosenthal told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "But it's really a disappointingly weak bill."

Rosenthal pointed out that senders of junk faxes can be fined up to $500 per fax in small claims court -- 50 times the penalty for a spam violation. He also said the law doesn't prohibit spam.

"I don't think people want their spam nicely labeled. I think they want it to stop," he said.

A study by the Federal Trade Commission found that two-thirds of spam messages made false claims and that 63 percent of those who requested removal from e-mail lists were not removed.

Unsolicited messages can clog the e-mail inboxes of computer users and carry computer viruses. The latest damaging virus, Sobig.f, was carried through an existing spam proxy network, said Steven Sundermeier, spokesman for antivirus software maker Central Command in Medina, Ohio. "