Expert: Dan Pepper - 11/9/2008

Question
My nephew is an IT student who wants to use the Internet to complete his assignments. He is assigned a project to study various multilevel marketing companies operating through the Internet. He visits sites of these companies to complete the assignment. For getting information, he has to register on these sites. As a result, he starts getting e-mail messages from domains of these companies. After completing his assignment, he blocked all incoming e-mail messages from those domains. However, he still continues to receive a lot of e-mail messages from other sites, which he had never visited. It has now become difficult for him to preserve important e-mail messages because his mailbox is constantly full.

What would be your advice for my nephew based on the above? Is there any legal course of action available for my nephew? Can you reference any relevant regulations that apply to this situation.


Answer
In addition to the federal CAN-SPAM Act, there are several state laws that regular unsolicited commercial email.  However, determining the identity of the sender of many of these emails is difficult, often making the process of bringing suit futile.

There are several spam blocking applications out there that may help.  Unfortunately, once an email address becomes readily available to unscrupulous websites, it is nearly impossible to get the spam to stop.  In the future, the best bet is to create a free email account for a particular purpose, and when that purpose is complete, you can simply delete the account.