It has been four months since Congress passed the permission-to-spam act and President Bush signed it with gusto. The first actual rule related to this act has just been published and the period to allow you, me and the spam industry to comment on the act's purposefully vague language has just ended. It might still be quite a while before we see any enforcement action related to this act, and it is likely to be the end of time before we see any effective enforcement action.

President Bush signed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 on Dec. 12 and the act went into effect Jan. 1, 2004. The bill's sponsors at the time touted the imminent end to the flood of crap in everyone's mailboxes. But anyone actually taking the time to read the act quickly realized that the primary goals of this legislation were to legally enable the sending of unsolicited bulk mail and to void any state or local regulations that actually tried to control the onslaught.

This shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone considering the apparent role of the spam industry in formulating the bill in the first place.

The act put the responsibility of interpreting and enforcing it into the hands of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC has moved with care (read: slowly) to get public comment on various aspects of the act so it can write the regulations needed before any actual enforcement of the mostly useless provisions of the act can be undertaken.

I find it hard to get enthusiastic about the usefulness of enforcing a law that makes it legal for every one of the many millions of companies in the world to send me e-mail and provides me no way to say that I don't want to get their initial messages. I can, by going through a dance defined by each sender, say I do not want any follow-up mail - whoop-de-do.

One of the act's few provisions that might make it easier to automatically filter some of the worst crap is the provision that requires senders of sexually explicit unsolicited e-mail to include words in the subject line to warn the recipient of the type of content. The FTC has just finalized a regulation that says the warning must be the English character string "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:". We conceivably will see this soon, but I wouldn't predict that the FTC is willing to even try to enforce any parts of this generally silly act.