According to security vendor MX Logic, around 75% of email is now spam. Of this, apparently only around 0.27% — about one message in three hundred and seventy — complies with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Color me unsurprised.

There've been a few high profile prosecutions based on CAN-SPAM, but apparently the authorities haven't yet caught up with most of the 99.63% of non-compliant senders. And before you get all happy about that 0.27% who are playing by the rules, let's remember that they're still sending spam: they're just sending spam that complies with the rather lax standards demanded by the lamentable CAN-SPAM Act.

I learned this from an article by the libertarian Cato Institute, who use these statistics to draw the predictable conclusion that government is ineffectual, wicked and rots your teeth. I wouldn't go quite so far, but the CAN-SPAM Act was certainly a lousy piece of legislation, which very probably did more harm than good.

To a large extent, CAN-SPAM was doomed from the outset. It was inevitable that the majority of spammers would ignore the majority of the requirements of the Act, and that many of the rest would simply fake compliance. This would have been true even if it had been a much better-written piece of legislation. To expect otherwise would have been naive. Nevertheless, it could have been much better than it was. Among the many things that CAN-SPAM could usefully have included but didn't are mandatory subject-labelling, a domain-level 'do not spam' registry, recourse for users whose addresses or domains are used in forged 'From:' lines, prohibitions against address-scraping and dictionary attacks, and exemplary punishments for anyone caught using other people's computers to send spam.

CAN-SPAM could have been a much better piece of legislation. It could also have been a much less awful one if it hadn't defined 'opt-out' as the standard, preempted state anti-spam laws and made it effectively impossible for individual recipients to bring suit against spammers. But our elected representatives chose to betray those who had elected them in order to pander to the desires of direct marketers and the result was the malevolent travesty known as CAN-SPAM. Three years on, I'm still disgusted.

And three years on, spam is still on the rise, and compliance is at an all time low. Heckuva job, people. Thanks for nothing.