DJIA One Year

You've Got—Way Too Much—Mail

Jan. 8, 2004

No surprise here. As all reasonable examiners predicted, the antispam bill that became law January 1st has done little to nothing in stemming the growing barrage of UCE.

The legislation, called the Can-Spam (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act, requires senders of unsolicited commercial email to have recipients opt out of future mailings, sets penalties for sending deceptive messages, and creates a national Do Not Spam list. The measure requires all email advertising—not just unsolicited messages—to include a valid reply-to address, a valid postal address and accurate headers and subject lines.

The mail-production.com mailserver blocks over 8,000 spam messages each week. How much time would that leave its mail users to do anything else but manage spam assults? And who in the world told the senators that spammers would do anything at all honorable with the responding victim's address, other than spam it death by sharing it with thousands of other active spammers? (i.e.—Never respond to a spammer in any way—never.)  

CIOs said it wouldn't work, knowing that much spam comes from outside the United States. Tod Ferran, CIO of Riverton Motor Co., an auto dealership based in Sandy, Utah, said you'd need ``the authority of a world government" to enforce such a law. Instead, he favors a technological solution (the open-source Mozilla email system he uses includes a mail-filtering feature) as well as ``education of the public" to not respond to spam solicitations.

Matt Kesner, CTO of the Fenwick & West LLP law firm based in Mountain View, CA, thought legislating against spam was worth a try, but he questioned why the US Senate passed a bill that trumped a stronger California antispam law requiring marketers to get permission from, or have an existing business relationship with, a recipient before sending mail. Without better technological and legal solutions he's afraid ``we'll get to the point where we accept email only from people we know."

I can't wait to get there.

Bye, Bye, Credit Histories

November 21, 2003
Richmond, VA

``Consumers should be worried," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearing House in San Diego. ``The infrastructure to protect information just isn't there in a lot of these places."  

Principal Reasons for Monday, October 19, 1987

Sept. 23, 2003
Richmond, VA
On Black Monday, October 19, 1987, the S&P 500© Index lost 20.5%; the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA)© lost 22.6% and the Nasdaq Composite lost 11.3%.

The aggregate implied volatility of money options on the S&P 100 (OEX)© jumped fourfold over the weekend from 36.4% Friday, Oct. 16, 1987, to 150.2% on Monday, Oct. 19th.

The true catalyst was, of course, foreknowledge of impending dollar devaluation on world exchanges:

1. dollar's decline against foreign currencies
2. deteriorating US near-term account deficit
3. escalating US government debt
4. higher PE ratios
5. lower dividend yields
6. unjustifiable investor confidence on equities

copyright  © 2003 mail-production.com^® created 2000 -- last modified 2004-01-19