The Spam Cryer

CAN-SPAM act now 5 years old – results in 300% increase in spam

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December 17th, 2008

The CAN-SPAM Act was passed into law in the USA in December of 2003 or some 5 years ago. What is the track record of that law? Has it been effective in stopping all spam?

Cisco recently released their ‘Annual Security Report for 2008’ and in it they show in a graph on page 4 that the volume of SPAM has climbed from approximately 60 Billion spam messages per day in May of 2007 to over 190 Billion SPAM Messages per day in October of 2008 or a 300% increase in SPAM in less than 18 months. Hardly seems like the CAN-SPAM act has been able to slow the flood. What was the daily spam volume prior to the 2003 debate and enacting of the act? I don’t have the numbers but I can assure you that a lot less than 60 Billion messages per day.

While there have been some spammers charged under it and some large judgments you would think with SPAM still being such a big problem that more would be done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Enforcement

Why has more not been done? Because the level of pain caused by spam that most people feel is still low enough that they don’t care to do more about it. Solutions like CudaMail have insulated the general public from the pain of SPAM. Yes they get a few messages once in a while that are spam but for each spam message they see Tens of thousands have been blocked. Imagine a day where all anti-spam measures failed and your mailbox went from a few hundred messages to 20,000 messages.

What could you do? Even taking 1 second to look at each message and delete the spam would result in you taking over 5 and a half hours of your day to just delete the spam. Do you have the time to do that?  Nobody does but that is effectively what the CudaMail system is doing for you each and every day – giving you back that 5 and a half hours each day that you don’t have to spend pounding on the delete key.

Aren’t you glad you have CudaMail?

Entry Filed under: Anti-Spam, Bulletins, CudaMail, Spam Firewall