"This message is sent in compliance with new email bill section 301. Under Bill S.1618 TITLE III passed by 105th U.S. Congress this message cannot be considered Spam as long as we include way to be removed, Paragraph (a)(c) of S.1618. Further transmissions to you by sender of this email may be stopped at no cost to you by sending a request to be removed to __"

Well it is, in plain language, a bunch of BULL!

U.S. Senate Bill 1618, an Anti-slamming Amendments Act, contained a Section 301, relating to transmissions of unsolicited commercial electronic mail. S.1618 was approved by U.S. Senate on May 12, 1998. It was then referred to House Committee on Commerce on October 21, 1998. The Bill DIED in committee and was never passed into law by 105th Congress. Nor has 106th Congress passed anything similar at this time. I was able to confirm this information both by checking U.S. Senate records and specifically by an inquiry with one of my Senators.

So first, quoted paragraph above is in error since bill never became law. Secondly, if it did become law messages I generally receive citing above, are quite deficient in compliance with alleged law that they reference. Here, in part, are exact requirements of bill that would have been law in respect to email if in fact bill had passed:

------------------------- SEC. 301. REQUIREMENTS RELATING TO TRANSMISSIONS OF UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL.

(a) INFORMATION TO BE INCLUDED IN TRANSMISSIONS-

(1) IN GENERAL- A person who transmits an unsolicited commercial electronic mail message shall cause to appear in each such electronic mail message information specified in paragraph (2).

I am writing this article as a warning. From time to time I write business articles for newsletters as a means of promoting my web site. An article of mine was recently picked up from an article-announcement list by a larger-than-usual number of newsletters.

For a while, it was great ! My resource box (similar to one below), pointed to my web site and, during this one week in particular, hit counter was going crazy. I had ten times normal number of visitors.

And then disaster struck. The hit counter slammed to a halt. Suddenly I was getting numerous emails from potential customers telling me that my site was down. Now, I had been with Virtual Avenue for about 3 years and never had a problem, so I thought maybe it was just a temporary glitch and that site would be back up next day or something. I visited their support page & asked them politely to investigate.

After visiting site, I began reading my emails again (I get about 120 per day, and I download my email twice a day), and came across a robot message from their abuse department. The message told me that a spamming complaint had been received and that they were shutting me down in 48 hours. Well that was nonsense for a start - they had already shut down all my sites !

The message said that I had spammed someone by sending them a newsletter. I quote -

*** We regret to inform you that your account dwr9760 will be deleted from our servers within next 48 hours because it violates our Terms of Service, found at http://www.virtualave.net /account/policies os

Reason: Spam complaints [1311819] Subject: whatUseek Weekly - The Stealth Approach To Making Money On The Internet ***