• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, November 2, 2023

The CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) took effect in January 2004, and scam artists promptly started using it as their playbook.

For instance, they barraged people with cold prospecting emails, ignored their desperate attempts to unsubscribe, used false header and domain information and employed botnets.    

Times have changed. Bad actors still do all of the above — and more. But people now have a different view of spam than they did when George W. Bush signed CAN-SPAM into law.

For instance, today’s consumers are less annoyed about receiving unrequested messages and more upset by unwanted and overly frequent ones, if you believe Chad S. White, writing in CMS Wire. And malicious emails are less a concern than irrelevant or unactionable content. (That is, if you’re not getting and responding to them).  

Moreover, CAN-SPAM was passed “well before much stronger anti-spam laws were passed in other countries, most notably CASL in Canada and GDPR in the EU, which have set email marketing standards for multinational American brands,” White observes. And it is less draconian than some state laws. 

CAN-SPAM also took effect years before mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo set their own strict rules. Gmail specifies in its Email Sender Guidelines that senders should “aim to keep your spam rate below 0.10%,” White says. “Moreover, they say senders should “avoid a spam rate of 0.30% or higher, especially for any sustained period of time.” Yahoo says it will follow this same standard.” 

That doesn’t mean you can ignore CAN-SPAM, but it shouldn’t be much of a problem. The beautiful thing about this law (for mailers) is that you don’t need permission to send. What you do have to do is let people off the list when they want. 

What does CAN-SPAM require? 

“CAN-SPAM says senders must include unsubscribe links in all promotional emails — that is, all emails that aren’t transactional in nature,” White says. “Moreover, it stipulates that unsubscribe processes should be simple and clear, and that senders can’t require additional information from people who want to opt out.”

But that’s not enough. 

CAN-SPAM is highly inadequate at a time when brands are trying to move from third-party cookies to first-person data.

More importantly, the email business itself has moved beyond it — all reputable marketers now adhere to a permission-based model. 

Maybe it’s time to reheat CAN-SPAM.