CAN-SPAM legislation proving useless against spam

It's easy to forget that CAN-SPAM was once hyped as the solution that would end all spam. But that was only the wishful dreaming of legislators who tend to think that passing laws automatically causes widespread compliance with those laws. In reality, spammers thumbed their noses at the law and kept on spamming.

A solution to spam remains elusive, but workable technologies that will halt spam are on the horizon: notably, the Puzzle Solution, Sender Permitted Framework and Email Caller ID.

• The employees of Southern Co., the parent of Birmingham's Alabama Power, receive 385,000 e-mail messages a day.
• Of those, 83 percent are filtered out by the Atlanta-based company's computer systems as spam, those unsolicited messages that have become an annoying fact of life in today's workplace, says Julia Segars, vice president and chief information officer for Alabama Power and sister company Southern Nuclear.
• Months after the federal government enacted the Can Spam Act on Jan. 1, junk e-mail messages continue to create havoc in workplaces all over, affecting both large corporations like Alabama Power and small entrepreneurs like Birmingham public relations man Carl Carter.
• Chris Cavanaugh, a University of Western Ontario business professor and author of "Managing Your E-mail - Thinking Outside the Box," isn't surprised that the Can Spam Act hasn't been very effective even though it made spammers eligible for jail time.
• Despite a brief drop in spam earlier this year, Segars said Alabama Power has seen a huge increase in the last few months.
• The company recently switched to a new anti-spam filter that has slashed the number of unsolicited messages dramatically, she said.
• They can hurt productivity by causing workers to spend time at work killing out unwanted messages while tying up company computers.
• A study by the ePolicy Institute, a Columbus, Ohio-based online research firm, found that 92 percent of workers receive spam at work.
• "For me, it wasn't so much about the spam as about the risk of losing legitimate e-mail among the junk."