Spam is not illegal

I was recently taken to task for claiming that unsolicited bulk email was spam.

Spam is illegal and Spammers are criminal. Let’s not mess about with words here. Calling someone a spammer is inflamitory [sic].

I’m not arguing that sending unsolicited bulk email is anything other than bad. And that a lot of senders have a negative reaction to being called spammers. I’ve even had hate mail for saying that an ISP was blocking mail because recipients were saying the mail was spam.
In the US, though, spam is not illegal. Violating CAN SPAM is illegal and may result in civil or criminal penalties. Sending mail to recipients that never gave permission? Not illegal.
Is there a lot of spam out there that violates CAN SPAM? Absolutely. But that’s not the sum total of email. In fact, that’s very little of the email that recipients actually see. ISPs and filtering companies do a pretty good job at filtering out most of the illegal stuff.
There is a lot of social pressure to not be perceived as a spammer. There is much social pressure to not send mail people like.
And, yes, there are countries where it is illegal to send mail without opt-in permission. Ironically, one of those countries is the UK. Marketers in the UK have 3 or 4 of my email addresses and frequently send me unsolicited email, in violation of their laws. I’ve even blogged about some of it.

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I received this piece of unsolicited email today, to an address harvested off a website. How many CAN SPAM violations can you count?

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TWSD: breaking the law

I tell my clients that they should comply with CAN SPAM (physical postal address and unsubscribe option) even if the mail they are sending is technically exempt. The bar for legality is so low, there is no reason not to.
Sure, there is a lot of spam out there that does not comply with CAN SPAM. Everything you see from botnets and proxies is in violation, although many of those mails do actually meet the postal address and unsubscribe requirements.
One of my spams recently caught my eye today with their disclaimer on the bottom: “This email message is CAN SPAM ACT of 2003 Compliant.” The really funny bit is that it does not actually comply with the law. Even better, the address it was sent to is not published anywhere, so the company could also be nailed for a dictionary attack and face enhanced penalties.
It reminds me of the old spams that claimed they complied with S.1618.

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One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM.
As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me.
I can report nothing has changed. He’s still violating CAN SPAM. He’s still claiming I have no right to post, share, spindle, mutilate or fold his spam. Well, in the interest in something, I thought I’d share the whole post this time. Just to warn folks from attempting to purchase services from appendleads.com (nice website, by the way).

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