CAN-SPAM Law Violated in 90% of Spam Sent This Weekend, According to Audiotrieve’s InBoxer Study

Updated on Monday, January 12th, 2004 at 12:00 am

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CAN-SPAM Law Violated in 90% of Spam Sent This Weekend, According to Audiotrieve’s InBoxer Study

BOXBOROUGH, Mass., Jan. 12 /PRNewswire/ — CAN-SPAM, the law that was
supposed to reduce clutter caused by junk e-mail, had little effect on the
nation’s inboxes this weekend, according to a study completed by Audiotrieve,
LLC, the makes of InBoxer antispam filters. Only 10% of all the spam analyzed
contained an e-mail address, relevant subject line, a physical address, and
the unsubscribe information required by the law that went into effect on
January 1.

Audiotrieve collected e-mail messages using so-called "honey pot" accounts
on January 10 and 11. We analyzed 1000 of these junk e-mail messages.
Honey-pot accounts are e-mail accounts designed to attract spam, but are not
in use by any individual. Therefore, none of the messages received by these
accounts were intended to be sent to a known person.

Only 102 of the 1000 messages analyzed contained all of the information
required by CAN-SPAM. While all the elements appeared in these 102 messages,
Audiotrieve did not try to verify that the physical addresses were correct or
whether taking the action required to unsubscribe would work. More of the
contact addresses were located in Southern Florida and Orange County,
California than from any other locations. The international addresses were
from Vancouver, Canada, Bermuda and the West Indies. While these messages
contained all kinds of pitches, none were pornographic in nature.

Physical addresses were missing from all of the remaining 898 spam
messages. While about one-third had unsubscribe links, Audiotrieve advises
against using them because unscrupulous spammers may use the response as
confirmation that an e-mail address is valid and will add the address to even
more lists.

"Unfortunately, CAN-SPAM doesn’t can spam. Companies that already act at
the margins of the law seem to also ignore these new regulations," said Roger
Matus, Chief Executive of Audiotrieve, the makers of InBoxer anti-spam
filters.

A 21-day free trial of InBoxer is available from http://www.inboxer.com.
InBoxer’s cost is $27.95.

About Audiotrieve and InBoxer

Audiotrieve, LLC (http://www.audiotrieve.com, http://www.inboxer.com) creates products
and services that sort, index and retrieve information that cannot be found
easily using traditional means. InBoxer separates the e-mail users want from
the e-mail they don’t. INBOXER is a trademark and AUDIOTRIEVE is a service
mark of Audiotrieve, LLC. All other marks are property of their respective
owners.