According to 15 U.S.C. 7704 §5(a)(5):
INCLUSION OF IDENTIFIER, OPT-OUT, AND PHYSICAL ADDRESS IN COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL.—
(A) It is unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission of any commercial electronic mail message to a protected computer unless the message provides—
(i) clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement or solicitation;
(ii) clear and conspicuous notice of the opportunity under paragraph (3) to decline to receive further commercial electronic mail messages from the sender; and
(iii) a valid physical postal address of the sender.
When my text-based mail client receives an HTML-only email message, it tries to render the HTML as text. It’s sometimes a jumbled up unreadable heap of garbage because the HTML is malformed and relies on a forgiving/tolerant rendering engine. Even when the HTML is well formed, hyperlinks are not exposed in the text rendered. E.g. a msg will say “to unsubscribe and stop receiving emails, update preferences here.”
Where is “here”? That is just raw text to me. Sure, an advanced user can do a number of things to dig up that link. But I doubt that would pass the legal standard of “clear and conspicuous”.
Anyone have confidence either way whether HTML-only spam is legally actionable on this basis?
(update) I should mention the most annoying offenders-- corporate senders (e.g. banks) that attach a plaintext MIME part, but then the motherfuckers use it to just say (in so many words) “You need to update your software”. This makes it extra difficult to see the content of the message because the text mail client of course shows the text MIME part by default.
And? Holding assets does not in itself trigger tax. Esp. how they are held. Whether your $100 is in a banknote or $100 in gold coins or Second Life game money, or $100 in a cheese wheel, in the absence of a transaction there’s no tax to speak of.
W.r.t accounts, it’s just foriegn accounts they want to know about, not domestic accounts. Walk me through the tax difference between the two (not interest, not cap gains, just having the account).
If that’s the case, that’s declared on a form that actually has effects on figures, which is not what I’m talking about. That would be an enumeration with a code that discretely assigns an activity from a list to an outcome. If you look at the signature box of the 1040, that’s just a freehand field. You can write “contractor” there or any number of vague things without affecting subsidies. I’m specifically talking about information that does not affect the figures.
Residence indeed affects the figures (whether you are inside or outside the US), but that’s already accounted for by the forms being submitted and the data on them. When a form arbitarily has a field for country of residence and that field in no way affects the figures, it’s extraneous info. Just a data collection that makes no difference to the bottom line. I just had a look at the 1116 form. Whether you write USA or Japan on the residence field makes no difference whatsoever in the in the calculation. You can write anything on that line and it does not change the calculation AFAICT.