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CAN-SPAM Still Failing To Slow Junk Mail

A month after the federal CAN-SPAM Act went into effect, most anti-spam vendors say that the new legislation hasn't cut down on the glut of junk mail in users' mailboxes.

According to numbers released this week by Brightmail, Postini, and Commtouch, three providers of message filtering and anti-spam solutions, the amount of spam they've intercepted since the Jan. 1 debut of CAN-SPAM has increased, went unchanged, or fallen by an insignificant amount.

The Redwood, Calif.-based Postini, for instance, rolled out its January 2004 data on Wednesday, and said that spam is still clogging inboxes, CAN-SPAM or no CAN-SPAM.

In January, spam accounted for 79 percent of all the messages that Postini processed for its 2,000-some enterprise customers, a tiny fall-off from the 80 percent logged in December 2003.

"The CAN-SPAM Act appears to have had little immediate effect on the amount of unwanted e-mail," said Andrew Lochart, Postini's director of product marketing.

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