The CAN-SPAM Act is five years old: what went wrong?

In December 2003, the US Congress, after consulting with technology companies, passed the law CAN-SPAM, which should be put an end to such a disgusting phenomenon as spam. Five years have passed. During this time, the volume of spam has increased tenfold, the last record was set in August - 164 billion messages. Rubbish makes up 97% of all email traffic on the Internet and causes US providers and companies only $ 42 billion in damage annually.

After five years, it seems that the notorious law, about which we buzzed our ears five years ago, brought almost no benefit. We see no effect, except for a few high-profile cases, when spammers managed to bring to criminal responsibility.

However, experts are inclined to believe that the adoption of CAN-SPAM had a definite meaning. First, the concept of spam was defined at the legislative level. Secondly, the law some basic standards of normal marketing and forced marketers to improve the ways of doing business. Five years ago, commercial offers made up the bulk of spam, and now their share has decreased to a modest 17%, while the rest of the volume is consumed by obvious criminals sending out malware and links to infectious sites.


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via Network World