CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

The CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act of 2003 went into effect at the beginning of this year. You can read about it at here. The law is set up to regulate spam, prohibiting techniques such as spoofing addresses, faking subject lines and ignoring recipients’ opt-out requests. It doesn’t ban unsolicited commercial e-mail outright.

I don’t know about you, but I’m still receiving a heck of a lot of spam these days, so it sure doesn’t seem like spammers are all that impressed with the new regulation laws. I’m still getting email with false headers and unlabeled sexually-oriented content. And the number of ‘increase the size of your…’ seems to have risen.

Most people believe that CAN SPAM probably won’t work. Anita Ramasastry summarized a number of reasons why the law will probably be ineffectual in her article The New Federal Spam Law. In it, she makes a case for why the law probably won’t work – namely, most spammers are from overseas or offshore ventures. Getting US spammers to pay large fees will probably be extremely difficult as well. There’s also the potential of a Do Not Spam registry similar to the Do Not Call list, but it’s doubtful that spammers will abide by that. On another note, the law may actually be a violation of the First Amendment because it restricts communication… so I guess we’ll have to wait for this to play out. Her belief is that the solution will be in technology, not the law.

Fortunately (perhaps?), Bill Gates has recently spoken about how Microsoft is working on a solution to reduce the overall amount of spam. If he has his way, spammers will soon be paying for unsolicited mail (read a Washington Post article about his recent comments). Whether or not he is all talk at this point remains to be seen…

As a legit, non-spamming newsletter owner, how do you make sure you comply with the new laws? Recently, Clickz.com published an article detailing a 10 point compliance checklist for email marketers that provides a pretty good outline of best practices to follow – which is nice since eMarketer has recently reported that 50% of email marketers don’t understand CAN-SPAM and 45% don’t know if their emailings comply.

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