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Spammers Not Complying With CAN-SPAM
Zelphyr writes "The Register is reporting on a study done by MX Logic found that of 1000 messages tested, only three complied with the recently enacted CAN-SPAM act. Little wonder why the spammers weren't shaking in their boots when this spam friendly anti-spam bill was passed."
There is evidence to the contrary.
No, most spammers operate from the US.
1) USA-based spammers don't give a shit about the new law
2) Overseas-based spammers have increased exponentially
3) USA-based spammers are offshoring just like every other IT industry
Will we soon be inundated with reports of Bangalore being the spam capitol of the world? After all, they aren't subject to the jurisdiction of USA-based spam laws. Forget offshoring your tech support, now you can offshore your spamming operations and be in total compliance with the law...
Spamassassin
SpamAssassin(tm) is a mail filter to identify spam.
Using its rule base, it uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify "spam", also known as unsolicited commercial email.
and Razor
What is Vipul's Razor?
Vipul's Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network. Through user contribution, Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation that is consulted by email clients to filter out known spam. Detection is done with statistical and randomized signatures that efficiently spot mutating spam content. User input is validated through reputation assignments based on consensus on report and revoke assertions which in turn is used for computing confidence values associated with individual signatures.
So why should they bust them for violating the spam law? The government has totally ignored the absolutely fraudulent nature of spamvertised products, despite the fact that the money trail is easier to follow than the email trail.
I suspect there will be political pressure to "bust" a couple of spammers, and they probably will nail a couple of small-timers and will trumpet it as a success, saying something like "Mr. Spam King sent over one million spam messages" -- the same bogus logic used in drug busts, when they value the drugs based on their smallest-possible-street-transaction value instead of the likely wholesale value.
Part of the reason I think there will be little enforcement, at least from the Bush administration, is that I've read that mainstream businesses are actually profiting from spam indirectly by selling customer lists that include email addresses. They don't sell directly to spammers, but they filter through direct marketers who ultimately DO sell to spammers.
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