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By Dominic Maher, 12 October 1999 00:15

NEWS Internet lawyers met with industry experts at Lawtel's Unsolicited Messaging on the Internet conference in London this month to discuss what steps need to be taken on the issue of spam. Lawtel, which provides an online legal database of UK lawyers, gathered delegates to see if a conclusion could be found for the potentially threatening problem of spamming. One attendee looked at the situation from a positive point of view, believing it could be of use to companies in their infancy. "Properly targeted, unsolicited commercial email will be of enormous benefit to small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in competing with large organisations on the Web. The reason it can be so useful is its very low cost of entry," said Robert Dirskovski, policy advisor on telecommerce at the Direct Marketing Association. But users do not want space taken up in email in-boxes by unwanted information, according to George Mills, chairman at EuroCause. "We don't want people's mailboxes to be cluttered by material that they haven't asked for or that people are expected to pay for something that they didn't request," he said. Delegates went on to talk about the role government and ISPs need to play in the future. To watch the News in View report in full tune into the IT law channel (http://www.silicon.com/law ).