Three Years of CAN-SPAM

It's amazing how time flies - the CAN-SPAM act has been with us for a little over three years!

Spam has risen significantly during the time the act has been in effect. Depending on who's study you trust - it's up somewhere between two-fold and four-fold.

No one really pretended that CAN-SPAM was going to end the problem of spam; the act only took a few basic steps to regulate the nature of unsolicited email. I figured it might be interesting to dig through my junk mail filters and see how well the first 10 messages complied.

The sample base isn't quite large enough to be considered "scientific" - but I think it should be enough to give a general idea of what impact CAN-SPAM is having on the content of spam.

Amongst other things, CAN-SPAM required any commercial email to contain:

Messages complying with all basic aspects of CAN-SPAM: 2/10

So even though CAN-SPAM doesn't prohibit the sending of spam, something around 80% (very roughly) of spammers ignore it entirely.

Why would spammers bother breaking a law, when they don't have to?

The answer is simple - email spam protection systems know what the CAN-SPAM act looks like. While roughly 20% of the spam that got caught was at least vaguely compliant, I haven't seen a single CAN-SPAM compliant email that was missed by the filters in months.

Complying with CAN-SPAM reduces the percentage of messages delivered to users, and hence the effectiveness of any spamming campaign.

There's a serious profit motive to simply ignore the entire CAN-SPAM act. Unless the FTC gets serious about cracking down on offenders, spammers will likely make more money ignoring CAN-SPAM than complying with it.

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