Spam and Small Biz: Good News, Mostly  By Lisa Miller Gail
Goodman, the CEO of marketing-software outfit Roving Software is
mighty relieved that Congress finally passed an anti-spam bill.
It's not that she thinks the legislation will finally halt spam
-- she doesn't. It's that she and her cohorts in the E-mail
Service Provider Coalition (ESPC) can finally stop lobbying
Congress and return their focus to building what they say is the
real spam solution: a formal registry of legitimate marketers,
and a screening system that lets service providers boot the bad
guys, without also getting rid of student -- loan approvals,
subscription e-mail newsletters, college-acceptance letters, and
all the other e-mails that recipients actually want to read.
"I'm extremely pleased [with the legislation] from the small
business perspective," Goodman says. "The consumer-protection
standards could have been stronger, but it makes the egregious
practices illegal, and it unifies the patchwork quilt of state
laws that were just unm