Look, I get tons of spam: I have had the same email address since 1997 and have never been shy about posting it anywhere and for any purpose with visibility to anyone. However, spam filters actually work well, and to the extent that don't work it doesn't take much time to deal with: spam is very obvious. When spam isn't obvious, I will argue it is actually a malicious phishing attack, and not spam.
Given this, you must realize that >99% of this spam is from random people whom are not actually subject to this law because they aren't at all traceable. If I have heard of the service, then it will be trivial enough to killfile (such as, "reject all messages from this domain; example: *@pcworld.com"), and much easier to do so than even clicking a single link to unsubscribe as you can make that a hotkey in your client.
(Sadly, people believe that they should rely on spam filters for this use case, which is ludicrous as there is no real way to differentiate "I signed up for PCWorld in 1999 and have since decided I no longer care" from "I never signed up for PCWorld, but they decided to start sending me things O hate" from "I like PCWorld and would love to hear about their new articles, so I subscribed" using remotely objective algorithms.)
(Even a human is going to get it wrong half the time, especially of they're as spam-touchy as the people on this thread reporting services I might personally use and like to Google as "spam" when they can and should either killfile the sender or take the extra 30 seconds to unsubscribe; people who do this just damage the effectiveness of spam filters by messing up the training sets with data that isn't truly indicative of the spam we need machine learning to filter.)
In essence, this law spends a bunch of time figuring out how to regulate people who were either never the problem in the first place, or we're the problem only because they decided to hand your email address to a third party they maybe shouldn't have (although the idea that you will combat spam by keeping your email secret is already a losing battle). Meanwhile, the people who cause the >150k spam messages I receieve per year to saurik@saurik.com just get to keep on spamming.
So, when you say spam is not a problem you mean it is not a problem for you. You know how to set filters; you're using machines a lot anyway (and thus the extra bandwidth and storage and processing isn't a burden) etc etc.
I'm gently worried about the spam vs ham problem. Some people must not ever have a false positive.
In theory this law encourages good companies to stay good companies and to not outsource to dodgy spam outfits.
It is weird that in 2012 we're still making up stuff about the best practice for sending email.
Normal people use hosted services like Gmail (Yahoo!, Outlook.com, fastmail.fm, etc.), and are not worrying about bandwidth or setup complexity.
You might claim Gmail is worrying about the bandwidth, but again: this kind of spam is a tiny tiny fraction of the spam problem. These people are already capable of using buttons that say "spam": a killfile is just another single-click button.
Finally, and again: the spam vs. ham problem is mostly complex because people are misdefining spam as "mail I don't want" as opposed to "mail I couldn't possibly have wanted" (and thereby use the spam button to punish people whose policies they dislike, which both mistrains filters and relies on machine learning to solve a straightforward problem that could be exactly solve by rules).
The spam in the latter category must be machine filtered, as this law, nor any other possible reasonable law, doesn't make even a small ding in it, while the remaining spam in the former category can be handled with one-button killfiles.
This law regulates exactly the people and companies who would otherwise have sent out massive amount of spams if not for the existence of the law. The fact that you are seeing spams from random strangers (the hacked accounts) is a testament to how well this law has work in curtailing the spams companies with lots of resources can send out.
The specific laws this admittedly "non-friendly" (which honestly, to me, was already kind of ludicrous and should not engender a positive response: the OP is simply calling out everyone who browses this forum as people he feels need to be reminded to follow laws, a stance that can only be construed as insulting) rant that started this discussion (and that I am thereby responding to) is discussing have absolutely nothing to do with sending large quantities of email: it has to do with specific ways that the user must have available to unsubscribe from continued messages coming from the same source.
This unsubscribe requirement is fundamentally, and frankly quite obviously, not superior to a killlist from the perspective of a normal user for the companies that the law could possibly apply to: it is unnecessary and does not solve a problem we actually have. Your comments about how this stops anyone, anywhere, from sending "massive amounts of spam", therefore, need to be defended, as otherwise they seem off-topic.
