Apparently, CAN-SPAM has been told to can it – by the spammers themselves. Only one percent of spam on the Internet last month complied with the federal law that took effect in January, in spite of a number of high-profile spam cases, according to a survey by MX Logic, an anti-spam outfit in Denver.
That compliance figure showed a drop from 3 percent in the first quarter of 2004, MX Logic said. And the company said it isn't quite sure why compliance fell. "This is a little surprising to us," director of government relations Sheila O'Neill told reporters when the MX study was released. She thought two reasons might be a growing spam volume from outside the United States and the failure of American spammers to take the law seriously.
The problem is also that many if not most spam-fighters didn't think CAN-SPAM was truly serious in the first place, criticizing especially the law's lack of an opt-in mechanism, in favor of the opt-out mechanism the critics say only allowed the spammers entry anyway.
California anti-spam company Postini thinks the spammers have ramped up their volume of spam as much in response to better filtering programs as to the openings still left by CAN-SPAM. Postini has estimated as much as 80 percent of all e-mail since January has been spam.
This week, Network Associates received a U.S. patent for its McAfee anti-spam system software, a patent the company says covers various computer program products, systems, and way to filter unwanted e-mail.
"Using a mixture of methods for detecting and preventing unwanted e-mail helps make McAfee anti-spam solutions as effective as possible," said Jeff Green, vice president of engineering at Network Associates, Inc. "Our patented technology provides our customers with reliable anti-spam solutions as they have come to expect from the industry-leading McAfee brand."
That mixture, Network Associates said announcing the patent, gives software and appliances each the means to make "intelligent" decisions about e-mail messages customers get, helping detect and prevent spam.
"[T]he granted patent encompasses systems, methods and computer program products that use a combination of techniques or rules in order to make determinations as accurate and effective as possible,," the company announcement continued. "According to a particular example among many encompassed by the granted patent, a combination of techniques used to filter unwanted e-mail messages implements multiple levels of protection including, but not limited to, compound filters, paragraph hashing and Bayesian rules."
At minimum, the program is welcome enough as a fighter in a spam war that seems often to get worse before it gets better – or is it?. Nucleus Research, for example, has now estimated that spam will cost large companies almost $2,000 per worker in lost productivity in 2004 alone. And that's in spite of better spam blocking technology, Nucleus said in a new report, "Spam: The ROI Killer."
"End users are receiving more than twice as much spam as they did ten months ago," the report said, "with respondents reporting an average of 29 e-mails a day against the earlier average of 13 e-mails." Accordingly, the report continued, average productivity snuffed by spam has hit 3.1 percent as of May 2004, compared to 1.4 percent in July 2003.
"The impact of filtering technology on the volume of spam has dropped from 26 to 20 percent," the report said. "Whereas spam filters have become more sophisticated over the past year, sheer growth in messages sent by spammers and corporate hesitation to set aggressive filters are among key factors driving this figure."
The report also tweaked the federal CAN-SPAM Act, now six months old, as an insufficient anti-spam tool. "As it now stands, the CAN-SPAM Act defines spam and curtails the activities of legitimate e-mail marketers," the report said, "but it doesn't yet do enough to dampen the burgeoning growth of egregious and illegal spammers."
Nucleus called on businesses to keep prodding lawmakers to "impose greater burdens on commercial e-mail marketing" and ramp up litigation against spammers – who have pretty much been defying the law anyway. .
