"The occurrence and exponential growth of Spam has resulted in lawmakers introducing more than ten separate pieces of legislation designed to stop it."

The CAN SPAM Act of 2003 went into effect January 1, 2004. Email marketers have 90 days from January 1 to become compliant. On March 30, 2004 those ninety days are up.

Personal computers are so cool. The coolest thing about them is that they connect to web servers, newsgroup servers and of course, email servers. Email allows anyone with a connection to communicate to one or one thousand with the click of a mouse.

Email may not be as personal as a phone call or hand-written letter but it makes up for that through economical convenience. In fact, net heads have gotten so used to email they’ve almost forgotten how to dial the phone or lick a stamp. Everybody uses email. Your granny might not know how to defrag her hard drive but she knows how to email. People the world over have embraced the concept of email. Is it any wonder that advertisers would take advantage of our planetary fondness for it?

Spam is the brand name of a pressed meat product. Spam is also the name given to the digital equivalent of junk mail. For the advertiser, Spam is an extraordinarily cheap and easy way to get your message out to thousands or even millions. Compared to the costs of junk mailing or telemarketing, Spam is incomparably cost efficient. Anyone with list of email addresses, client software and an Internet connection can send out Spam and that’s the problem. Anyone can Spam so everyone does it.

Just like junk mail and telemarketing, unsolicited email advertising is irritating. What makes Spam worse is that it’s so effortlessly propagated. An average Internet user can receive a hundred Spams a day. That Spam takes up space on a mail server. It takes times to sift through and filter out. This digital trash costs time and money to the ones who are the recipients.

Even if Spam weren’t so prevalent, it would still be a source of distress due to the shady tactics of many email marketers. From false SUBJECT lines to spoofed senders, Spammers will try every lousy trick in the book to get you to open their missives.

For many spammers, the fake Subject line is the most common ruse. You’ll see the faux RE: SUBJECT line. You’ve undoubtedly viewed the SUBJECT line that states “About your account”. Whatever lies a spammer can imagine, you’ll find them told in the SUBJECT line of an unsolicited email. Another lie is the spoofed return email address. This falsity makes it practically impossible to determine exactly who has sent the Spam. A third lie is the bogus ‘remove’ link at the bottom of many Spam emails. The reader is told that they’ll be removed from the Spam mailing list if they simply click the hypertext link at the bottom of the message. The lie comes when the person is not removed and is subject to even more Spam.

The occurrence and exponential growth of Spam has resulted in lawmakers introducing more than ten separate pieces of legislation designed to stop it. One of those pieces of legislation became a law effective January 1, 2004. That law is the CAN SPAM Act. Enforcement of the CAN SPAM Act will be the job of the Federal Trade Commission. Email marketers have ninety days from the enactment of the law to get compliant. March 30, 2004 is when the ninety-day grace period is over.

Roughly, there are four rules you have to follow in order to be compliant with this new law.

The first rule is that the sending email address must be real. No spoofing. The second rule is there should be no misleading text in the SUBJECT line. In fact, if the email is an advertisement, the SUBJECT line must state that the email is an ad. The third rule is you must provide a legitimate opt-out link within a commercial email. The fourth rule is the spammer has to post a physical mailing/contact address within the body of the email.

Naturally, CAN SPAM has additional conditions and rules for adult commercial emailers. According to the text of the law there is a “REQUIREMENT TO PLACE WARNING LABELS ON COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL CONTAINING SEXUALLY ORIENTED MATERIAL”.

The FTC is in charge of enforcing the CAN SPAM law. They have suggested that the official warning label for porn emails be: SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT-CONTENT: All 26 characters, including the hyphens and the colon. As per the law, that tag must be in both the SUBJECT line as well as at the top of the email message body. However, the FTC is still waiting for approval and taking public comments on the final wording.

The grace period isn’t quite over and there are already lawsuits filed against emailers for violating the CAN SPAM law. If you do any kind of emailing for your adult site, service or sponsor then you need to know the law so you can become compliant. The find official text of the CAN SPAM law, do this:

1. Go to http://thomas.loc.gov
2. Type S 877 in the search box on the top left corner and click "Search".
3. On the resulting page, click link number six.

Whether or not you believe the CAN SPAM Act is a good law, you probably don’t want to be charged with violating it. Read the law. Become compliant. Then you can spam.