From: Howard Lowndes [lannet@lannet.com.au] Sent: Tuesday, 14 October 2003 2:42 PM To: ECITA, Committee (SEN) Cc: Ley, Sussan (MP) Subject: Submission to Senate Committee Inquiry on UCE, aka SPAM I make this as a submission by a private individual who is an Information Technology Consultant by profession. The move by the government to enact legislation to outlaw unsolicited email (aka The Spam Bill) is to be commended in principle. However I have several reservations about the classes and categories of organisations that will be exempt from the Bill. The principle reason for my objection to the exemptions is because of the very nature of electronic mail traffic as against postal mail traffic. Postal mail traffic is a "sender pays" activity and even though I have little control over what is put into my mail box, there is little if any real cost to me to transfer unwanted mail from my mail box to the rubbish bin. With electronic mail traffic I again have very little control over what is delivered to my electronic mail box, except perhaps for the ability to deny acceptance from certain specific addresses where I have prior knowledge of same, or to deny acceptance of emails over a certain size (assuming that the size is notified anyway, which is not always the case). The big difference here is that I also have no control over the very real cost of being forced to receive that email. In the last four months I have received over 36 Mb of email traffic that is wholly SPAM, and that has cost me real money in traffic charges. [At this point I will not even go into the additional traffic charges due to infected Microsoft systems connected to the Internet (currently around $150 per month in additional traffic charges)] There is nothing in the proposed Bill to stop any exempt organisation from sending me, AT MY COST, very large data files (and .PDF formats and .DOC formats can be VERY large) trying to induce me to "Switch to Jesus", "Switch to Allah", "Vote for Me", "Look what a great job the Government is doing", "Look what a lousy job the Government is doing", "Adopt a child in Biafra", "Get your post graduate qualifications at our university", "You bought from us 10 years ago and we know you will just love our new product". My message is very simple: Opt-In, Opt-In, Opt-In, and NO exemptions. My contact details are _only_ for the purposes of _this_ submission and are not to be used for _any_ other purpose: Howard F Lowndes PO Box 1174, Lavington, NSW 2641 02 60 400 222 howard@lowndes.name -- Howard. LANNet Computing Associates - Your Linux people ------------------------------------------ Flatter government, not fatter government - Get rid of the Australian states. ------------------------------------------ To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it. - Scott Granneman, SecurityFocus