FTC reports spam in decline

By Steve Malone

Posted on 22 Dec 2005 at 10:40

The US Federal Trade Commission says that the controversial CAN-SPAM Act is working. In a report on the working of the anti-spam Act, the Commission says there has been a steady decline in the amount of junk email which fills the world's inboxes.

The FTC quotes email filtering firm MX Logic as reporting that during the first eight months of 2005, spam accounted for 67 per cent of email passing through its system, a nine per cent decrease from the same period one year earlier. AOL, with around 20 million users world wide says that the volume of spam email has declined even further and says that its members received 75 percent less spam in 2004 than in 2003.

The report also quotes the April Pew Internet & American Life Project survey which found that spam was less of an issue than it was. From February 2004, just after the Act became effective, to January 2005, the percentage of consumers annoyed with spam dropped from 77 per cent to 67 per cent. However, whether this is people becoming more accepting of spam or whether they have noticed a real drop is not known.

The CAN-SPAM Act came into law at the beginning of 2004. Since then the FTC has brought 20 case to court while the Department of Justice, ISPs and others have taken action in another 30 cases.

While the FTC thinks the CAN-SPAM Act does not need any amendments at this time, it asks the US Congress to pass the US SAFE WEB Act, which, it says, would improve its ability to track down spammers and sellers who operate outside the United States. It also says that consumers should be made more aware of the anti-spam products which are currently available.

Finally it urges the further development of new weapons in the battle against spam in particular domain-level authentication alongside reputation and accreditation systems. Such tools, being developed by a number of companies including Microsoft and Yahoo!, require that bulk emailers register with a central agency and that checks are put in place to confirm that the 'sent' address is correct.