Happy Birthday CAN-SPAM!

The CAN-SPAM (The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act is celebrating its 5th birthday. President Bush signed it into law in December 2003. The act mandated that marketers comply with the following mandates:

• Ensure that the “FROM” line clearly reflects the sender’s identity
• Include subject line text consistent with message content
• Include their valid postal address
• Contain a working opt-out mechanism as a way for the consumer to decline to receive further commercial email from the sender. (Although most experts advise never clicking an opt out link in a spam message as it usually just tells a spammer your address is active and actually reads spam!)

The act also authorized the FTC to create a “Do Not Email” registry. So has the act really done much to stem the flow of spam? Not really, because most spammers simply locate their business in countries with no or very lax anti-spam laws or use methods like forged headers and spoofed addresses to hide under. Actual CAN-SPAM compliance is less than 1%. Dismal. There have been a few prosecution and multi-million dollar settlements (which the plaintiffs are highly unlikely to ever see) but for the most part CAN-SPAM is ignored by spammers and has become the “YES-I-CAN-SPAM” Act.

Until there is a global anti-spam initative in place and spammers can no longer hide in obscure Eastern European locals, the flood of spam is not going to be stemmed anytime soon.