Porn spammers ignore new labelling rule
Published: 27 May 2004 11:30 BST
Spammers flooding the Internet with pornographic solicitations apparently are not abiding by a new federal rule that took effect last week.
Not only did illegal sexually-explicit spam fail to slow down after the regulations took effect on 19 May, but pornographic email measured by one anti-spam company jumped from about 2 million messages in a 40-hour period last week to about 2.5 million during the same period this week.
The Can-Spam Act that President Bush signed in December required the Federal Trade Commission to come up with a label for unsolicited pornographic email. The FTC responded by declaring that anyone sending sexually oriented material must include the warning "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:" in the Subject line. Violators face fines.
Brightmail, an anti-spam company in San Francisco, said that it measured 2 billion junk email messages in the 40-hour period last week after the FTC rule took effect. Of the 2 million that were pornographic, 40 percent had some sort of label that resembled what the FTC mandated.
But a Brightmail representative said many of those sex-labelled messages still appeared to be illegal in some way. "This is usually an attempt by spammers to make their messages look as though they are in compliance, when in most cases they are not in compliance with the law," spokeswoman Linda Munyan said. Brightmail, which is set to be purchased by Symantec, performed the analysis in response to a request from ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com.
When politicians in Congress touted the Can-Spam Act last year, they predicted it would help clean out clogged Internet inboxes. "Americans are tired of just watching and fretting over inboxes clogged with offensive email, and this legislation is an important step toward giving consumers more control," said senator Ron Wyden.
The Senate is in its Memorial Day recess this week, and Wyden could not immediately be reached for comment.
During an appearance before the Senate last week, however, an FBI official said that agents were readying cases against 50 of the most noxious spammers for prosecution later this year.
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