Early test shows new CAN-Spam law has little effect on junk e-mail

The federal CAN-Spam law that went into effect January 1 appeared to have little impact on junk e-mail in a recent test by technology company Audiotrieve LLC. The Massachusetts-based maker of anti-spam filter InBoxer found that 90% of all the unsolicited e-mail it evaluated during January 10-12 didn’t contain all the required elements set out in the new law: an e-mail address, relevant subject line, physical address, and unsubscribe information.

Only 102 or 10% of the 1,000 messages reviewed contained all the information required by CAN-Spam. Audiotrieve did not verify whether the physical addresses were correct or the unsubscribe instructions worked.

The company reviewed e-mails sent to “honey pot” e-mail addresses it had set up – so called because they were established solely to see whether they would attract unsolicited commercial e-mail. No person ever sent e-mail from the addresses, so any e-mail received at the addresses was not addressed to any known individual. “Any e-mail that these addresses get is by definition spam,” says Audiotrieve CEO Roger Matus.

More of the contact addresses where provided were located in southern Florida and Orange County, CA. International addresses were from Vancouver, B.C., Canada; Bermuda and the West Indies. None of the messages was pornographic in nature.

Physical addresses were missing from 898 spam messages reviewed. About one-third of these had unsubscribe links, but though the law requires commercial e-mail to have an unsubscribe mechanism, Audiotrieve advises against using the links to get off of unsolicited mail lists because spammers may use the response as confirmation that the e-mail address is valid and circulate the address to even more lists. ‘Unfortunately, CAN-Spam doesn’t can spam,” says Matus. “The companies that already act at the margins of the law seem to ignore these new regulations.”