Happy 5th Birthday to the CAN-SPAM Act (The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) of 2003!  The CAN-SPAM Act was the brainchild of Senators Burns of Montana and Wyden of Oregon in April 2003 before undergoing some revision and being signed into law by President Bush on December 16th, 2003 (ok, so the real birthday was yesterday).  The CAN-SPAM Act took effect on January 1, 2004.

Although a standard for how ESPs enforce compliance on the part of their customers, it has largely been ignored by spammers.  MX Logic has been tracking adoption of the CAN-SPAM Act since its inception and even at its peak only about 3% of all spam was in compliance.  This was in May 2004.  Compliance has typically hovered around 0.2-0.3% since 2005.  As a result, many have resorted to calling it the U-CAN-SPAM Act.

If you are not familiar with the CAN-SPAM act it imposes a number of requirements on commercial email:

-- Ensure that the "FROM" line clearly reflects the sender's identity

-- Include subject line text consistent with message content

-- Include the advertiser's valid postal address

-- Contain a working opt-out mechanism as a way for the consumer to decline to receive further commercial email from the sender

As part of the CAN-SPAM Act the FTC was also authorized to create a "Do Not Email" registry, much like the existing "Do Not Call" registry for telemarketing.

We blogged back in October about a loophole that auspiciously exists in the CAN-SPAM Act which does not disallow the mass sending of unsolicited political email, due to its non-commercial nature.  This opinion drew quite a bit of both positive and negative comments from both sides of the aisle. 

So, as we move forward into 2009 and you toast in the New Year, be sure to raise a glass to the CAN-SPAM Act.  Five years of reducing spam to nobody!