A federal law intended to curb the scourge of junk e-mail appears to have had little effect so far in discouraging spammers from deluging inboxes. In the two weeks since the Can-Spam Act, a U.S. law barring unscrupulous bulk e-mailing practices, took effect this year, providers of spam-filtering software say they're blocking more messages than ever. Spammers, they say, are either ignoring the law or pretending to comply with guidelines for legitimate e-mail marketing. . . .
A federal law intended to curb the scourge of junk e-mail appears to have had little effect so far in discouraging spammers from deluging inboxes.

In the two weeks since the Can-Spam Act, a U.S. law barring unscrupulous bulk e-mailing practices, took effect this year, providers of spam-filtering software say they're blocking more messages than ever. Spammers, they say, are either ignoring the law or pretending to comply with guidelines for legitimate e-mail marketing.

"We certainly haven't seen any drop in the volume of spam," said Karl Jacob, chief executive of Cloudmark, a developer of tools for blocking junk e-mail. "It's still the same lock-step day-over-day, minute-over-minute increase."

If anything, Jacob said, spammers are getting smarter. In an attempt to outfox filters, they've created programs that rapidly morph the content of messages, so that only three or four identical e-mails are sent out at a time.

With the advent of Can-Spam, Jacob said spammers are also increasingly guilty of "faux compliance," exploiting a caveat in the law that permits unsolicited e-mails from legitimate marketers who allow recipients to opt out of future mailings. Unscrupulous junk mailers are pretending to go along with the guidelines by including false return addresses for opting out.

Cloudmark, which provides spam blocking primarily to businesses and government agencies, estimates that 45 percent to 50 percent of messages it handled this month were spam, about on par with December.

At Brightmail, which filters spam from close to 300 million e-mail inboxes for Internet service providers and businesses, the portion of junk messages was somewhat higher. The company estimated that 61 percent of all e-mails it filtered in the first week of January qualified as spam. In December, prior to Can-Spam's enactment, about 58 percent of the 80 billion messages were deemed spam.

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