A year after the U.S. Congress passed the first federal antispam law, observers see no evidence that it has cut the amount of unwanted commercial e-mail arriving in U.S. residents inboxes.
Most vendors of antispam products have charted an increase in the amount of spam since the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act went into effect on Jan. 1.
CAN-SPAM includes criminal penalties, ranging up to five years in prison, for some common spamming practices, including hacking into someone else’s computer to send spam and using open relays to send deceptive spam. The law allows fines of up to US$250 per spam e-mail with a cap of $6 million for aggravated violations.
But some antispam activists assert that the law has aided spammers because CAN-SPAM requires recipients to opt out of unwanted commercial e-mail by contacting each sender, instead of forcing senders to get opt-in permission. The federal law also hurt spam-fighting efforts by pre-empting parts of some tougher state laws, including a California opt-in requirement, said Laura Atkins, president of the SpamCon Foundation.
Read the Complete Story @ Mac Central
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