• by July 7, 2004

Calling spam a "modern day epidemic," the head of Australia's communications agency urged countries to work together to try to control and contain the problem.

Robert Horton spoke in Geneva, Switzerland at a gathering of the International Telecommunications Union which hosted the meeting on spam. Representatives from 60 countries attended the meeting, along with officials from the World Trade Organization.

The United Nations, in addition to everything else on its plate (Iraq, among the many global crises and conflagrations), wants to bring spam under control within two years by standardizing legislation in an attempt to make it easier to prosecute spammers. The U.N. thinks it can control the global spam scourge within two years. Mmmmm.

Horton said that controlling pornographic spam content should be a top priority. The ITU estimates that as much as 85 percent of all email may be categorized as spam, compared to an estimated 35 percent a year ago. The majority of spam is created by a few hundred people. Existing legislation makes it difficult for authorities prosecute hard-core spammers.

Spam and anti-spam protection cost computer users an estimated $25 billion last year, according to the United Nations. And spam is going beyond the PC to wireless phones. This was a new one to me. According to Horton, 9 of every 10 spam messages in Japan are sent to mobile phones as text messages.

In the U.S., we've got the Can-Spam law, which according to some research, hasn't been very effective in the six months since it was passed. Yesterday, I received a note from Scott Ferber, the Advertising.com CEO, who wondered if we had found an independent, third-party source of research on the effectiveness of the Can-Spam law. To date, we have used data from Vircom and Brightmail, both are providers of email security products and services which have a vested interest in substantiating that the law isn't working. To date, I haven't found such a source, although market researchers Forrester and the like may be conducting research on the topic. After all, it's six months since the bill's passage.

If you know of an independent source with data on the effectiveness, to date, of the Can-Spam law, let us know.