CAN-SPAM’s utter failure

To be fair, even when the CAN-SPAM Act was passed five years ago, there was much skepticism over whether it would actually work. But I guess I always hoped that it would do something to stem the tide. Here we are, five years later, and the volume of spam traffic is up tenfold, and much of it is more malicious than it was before. Now, when spammers get their hooks into you, they really sink them in. Carolyn Duffy Marsan takes a closer look at what went wrong, and reflects on some of the things people said about spam that seem pretty ridiculous in retrospect. Plus, we also look at a few of the spammers who actually did pay at the hands of CAN-SPAM.