U.S.A. Prepares to Legalise Spam

On 22 November the U.S. House of Representatives passed the CAN-SPAM ("Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing") bill, the Senate looks set to follow, and it is expected that the President will sign the bill on 1 January 2004.

The bill has some good features: it makes the use of open proxies or resource misappropriation, or the use of false headers illegal.

Unfortunately, the bill adopts an opt-out approach - messages are legal if they are clearly marked as advertisements, contain a U.S. postal address and have an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Does anyone know how many U.S.A. companies there are, and how long it would take an average user to read a single message from each one, and respond with an unsubscribe request?