Sen.-elect Dole isn't the only candidate who has found blasting out e-mails a useful campaign tool. In March 2002, a Republican candidate for governor in California, Bill Jones, sent messages with forged headers to voters, routing the spam through the server of an elementary school in Chonnam, Korea.

In 1999, New Jersey Republican Murray Sabrin caught heat for his spam campaign for Senate. And this year, Delaware Democrat Steve Biener defended his spamming for Congress on the grounds that it allowed him to run for office without accepting donations from special interests.

Politicians appear to spam for the same reasons that hawkers of "amazing love potion that works" do. It's a cost-effective way to get their message out.

But do the politicians have the right to send junk mail?

It all depends on the view the courts take of the e-mail in box. If your in box is considered private property, does that mean you can sue someone for trespassing on it to speak to you? Or does merely having an e-mail in box amount to an invitation to strangers to send you messages? Or does the in box occupy a more ambiguous level of privacy, just like a mailbox placed in front of a house to receive letters?

Atkins of the SpamCon Foundation takes a hard line on in-box privacy: "There's no right for someone to trespass on your property and talk to you," she says.

Jonathan Zittrain, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, compares candidate spam to a "political pamphleteer letting himself into your house to give you some literature when you hadn't bothered to answer the door."

While speech itself may be protected, the method of delivery of a message may not be.

"If you break into somebody's house to write them a note or write a note and tie it to a rock and throw it through their window, those are communication too," says David Sorkin, law professor at the Center for Information Technology & Privacy Law at John Marshall Law School in Chicago. "If you print up fliers and drop millions of them from a plane, you could prosecute that as littering, even though the sole purpose of that is to communicate."

But First Amendment advocates reject the window-shattering analogy. "I don't think that anyone thinks that getting an unwanted e-mail is like a rock through your window," says Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The speech implications of deciding that every time someone sends you a message it's trespass are tremendous."

While some states, like North Carolina, explicitly limit their spam laws to "commercial" e-mails, other state statutes apply more generally to "bulk" e-mail. Legal scholars stress that the courts have traditionally afforded political speech an even higher level of protection under the First Amendment than commercial speech.

But spam laws simply haven't been on the books long enough to be subject to a constitutional challenge. "This is still surprisingly cutting edge," says Zittrain.

According to Sorkin, there have already been hundreds of suits filed under new state anti-spam laws, brought by individuals, like Pugh, who are fed up with spam and trying to use the courts to make a point. But most of those have been in small-claims court, where rulings do not establish legal precedent.

As for Pugh, he hopes that his small-claims court case will teach Dole, who will begin representing him in the Senate next year, a lesson about spam. "This is sending a message by saying: 'You spammed. You should know better,'" he says. "If I win, they'll know not to spam me again. If I lose, at least I've raised the issues."

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