* Spammers fail to comply with anti-spam law
A new report from MXLogic about the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM) found that compliance with the act dropped from an insignificant 3% in April to a really insignificant 1% in May – the same level it reached in the first month after it went into effect.
Compare this with the 90%-plus that even basic anti-spam software can block right out of the box.
In a related development, MXLogic also found a much higher compliance rate with the Federal Trade Commission mandate of labeling pornographic and related content in the subject line of e-mail, which started May 19. In the first seven days after the requirement went into effect, a sampling of 12,000 pornography-related messages found that 15.3% of them bore the FTC-mandated label.
I don’t know what to make of the fact that purveyors of pornography are dramatically more law-abiding than marketers in general. Maybe pornographers perceive that the label is actually good marketing, distinguishing their offerings from mortgage advertisements!
Perhaps considering the lack of success of the CAN-SPAM Act five months into its existence, the FTC last week announced that it would not create a do-not-spam registry. I think this is a smart move, not only because such a registry would have virtually no impact on the amount of spam received, but also because it would be a resource of fresh and valid e-mail addresses that would be extremely valuable for spammers and could make the spam problem worse.
The FTC also announced it is pushing the adoption of authentication as a means of reducing spam, another smart move, and might even require ISPs to standardize on a scheme if the industry cannot adopt one on its own.
In short, technology-based solutions to the spam problem offer a dramatically better method of identifying spam than do laws – 30 to 90 times better, in fact. Authentication will provide even more protection from spam-related problems.
