Spammers flout law

NEWS Only a fraction of the unsolicited email slipping into in-boxes complies with a federal anti-spam law, according to new research.

Only 3 percent of bulk commercial email includes a valid US postal mail address and a valid link to opt out of future messages, according to data released on Tuesday by MX Logic, a maker of mail-filtering software. Those requirements are part of the Can-Spam Act, short for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing, the nation's first federal spam law.

What's more, the amount of spam has continued to grow since the law went into effect at the beginning of the year. As much as 60 percent of email sent in January was spam, up from 58 percent in December, according to Brightmail, one of the largest spam-filtering companies.

"We're seeing more spam than ever," said Ken Schneider, chief technology officer at Brightmail, which fields between 3 billion and 4 billion email messages a day.

Yet direct email marketers are beginning to comply more often with the law, and many others are still attempting to understand its effects, Schneider said. "It's a little bit early to see huge amounts of compliance, but we are seeing people start to comply," he said.

Some legal antispam rules are still being worked out. In recent weeks, the Federal Trade Commission, which is charged with enforcing the Can-Spam Act, proposed a rule that would require senders of adult-related email to include the phrase "Sexually-Explicit-Content:" in messages. That way, recipients would be able to recognise and easily filter such email before viewing it. Schneider said that more emailers are already including the tag "ADLT."

Scott Chasin, chief technology officer at MX Logic, said that the Denver company is seeing more email that originates overseas -- as much as 60 percent in January, up 1 percent from December. Spam attacks from "zombie machines," or hijacked PCs, are also on the rise, he said.

To conduct its survey, MX Logic analysed 10,000 random pieces of commercial email over a 30-day period ending in February to detect a valid postal address and an opt-out link. In the first week of January, it surveyed 1,000 messages similarly and found that only 1 percent of email complied with the law.