Want more anti-spam laws? How about enforcing what's already there?

While CAN-SPAM doesn't make sending unsolicited email illegal, it places certain requirements on the messages. Surprisingly, almost none of the spammers follow these guidelines.

There seem to be two highly obvious violations taking place. Mailers are supposed to include a physical address for their place of business. A quick survey of the intercepted messages folder of my spam filter indicates nearly none of them meet this requirement. This has been verified by more scientific studies.

Another common infraction deals with messages containing adult content. Senders are required to place a notification in the subject that their message is "sexually explicit" if it contains adult oriented content. Doing so would enable parents and anti-spam filter software to easily cope with these messages, preventing their children from being exposed to the habits of housewives gone wild.

The problem is that labeling their messages as such would cause them to get blocked by spam e-mail blocker programs nearly 100% of the time. So, they almost never are labeled.

There are also countless other CAN-SPAM provisions and state laws regulating commercial email content. I would speculate that 99% of spam email is in someway illegal, even though its not illegal just for being spam.

Spammers are willing to take chances breaking the law because usually it pays. Enforcement is increasing, but still rare. In this case, petty-crime definitely continues to pay good money.

So, before placing yet another level of regulation on email, how about more consistently going after parties breaking existing laws?

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