Bust deceptive junk emailers, but don't ban the spam completely was the message at the heart of a report delivered to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this week. It was submitted by a wide-reaching coalition of Internet businesses and interest groups that had been charged by the FTC with investigating how to regulate the controversial business of unsolicited commercial junk email, or "spam".

The coalition, called the Ad-hoc Working Group on Unsolicited Commercial Email, called on the FTC to fashion regulations that would make it illegal to send spam with deceptive subject headings. If the email is advertising a pornography site, for example, its heading should make that clear, the report said. Led by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based group that examines online issues, the group including AOL and the Direct Marketing Association concluded after a months-long investigation of the spam problem that completely banning junk email would threaten free speech. Honest advertising would work better, the report said.