Some 6 percent of unsolicited e-mail dumped on the Internet in November
complied with the CAN-SPAM law passed by the U.S. Congress last year,
according to MX Logic, an e-mail 
security firm located in Denver.
The company has been tracking CAN-SPAM compliance since the law went into effect in January and issues monthly reports on the subject based on a random sample of 10,000 e-mails analyzed on a weekly basis.
Six percent is the highest rate of compliance reported by MX Logic since it began conducting its tracking reports.
Spammers Are Crooks
"At this rate, maybe by 2015 we'll have 100 percent compliance," MX Logic Chief Technology Officer Scott Chasin told TechNewsWorld.
According to Trevor Hughes, executive director of the Email Service Provider Coalition, an online advertising industry group based in York, Maine, legitimate advertisers are complying with the law. "It's fair to say that darn close to 100 percent of legitimate businesses are doing their very best to comply with the law," he told TechNewsWorld.
"We know that spammers are crooks," he said. "It would be somewhat ironic, if not perverse, for them to comply with CAN-SPAM yet at the same time send fraudulent and deceptive e-mail. So I don't think that six percent number is necessarily instructive or illuminating."
Spam Traffic on Rise
Although CAN-SPAM, when it was passed, was touted as a means to reduce spam traffic on the Internet, MX Logic reported that about 75 percent of all e-mail on the Net is spam. During this same period last year, that figure was around 67 percent, Chasin noted.
"You'd have to have an inbox on Mars not to see that spam proliferates on the Internet," he said.
That proliferation will be getting worse in the coming months, according to John Reid, a volunteer with the Spamhaus project, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting spam worldwide. Based on the current growth of spam curve, he said, by the first quarter of next year, more than 90 percent of all e-mail will be spam.
"That means that only one out of 10 e-mails that arrives at an ISP is a valid e-mail," he told TechNewsWorld. "The rest of it is just garbage."
Sent But Not Seen
While spam traffic on the Internet increases, however, spam arrivals in the inboxes of individuals might be decreasing. That's because more and more organizations are deploying anti-spam systems, according to Paul Judge, chief technology officer for CipherTrust in Atlanta.
In 2004, he noted, three times more organizations deployed anti-spam solutions than deployed them in 2003. "That trend is continuing month to month," he told TechNewsWorld.
The proliferation of anti-spam software coupled with improvements in identifying junk e-mail has upped the ante for spammers, he asserted.
"We can stop 98 percent of spam at the e-mail gateway," he said. "So at the end of the day, there's significantly less spam being received in inboxes. That's certainly why spammers are sending more spam."
Net of the Living Dead
Anti-spam measures are also inciting spammers to increasingly depend on networks of compromised computers, or zombie networks, to distribute their detritus.
In its report, MX Logic noted that zombie networks account for as much as 69 percent of all spam on the Net on a daily basis. "A lot of that is in response to how service providers are starting to block direct, outbound mail flow from their subscriber nodes," Chasin said.
Next month, the CAN-SPAM law will celebrate its first anniversary, but aside from some headline-grabbing lawsuits, it appears to have accomplished very little.
"For the bulk of the bad guys, the law has made absolutely no
difference whatsoever," John Thielens, chief technology officer for
Tumbleweed Communications (Nasdaq: TMWD) 
, an e-mail security firm in Redwood City,
California, told TechNewsWorld. "It's downright silly."
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