Federal SPAM Act

The first federal law in the U.S. that deals specifically with SPAM (unsolicited commercial e-mail) went into effect January 1, 2004. This law is called the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003. For short, it has been nicknamed the CANSPAM Act of 2003. This is the first federal law that actually focuses on e-mail itself as a type of commerce.

This act prohibits using e-mail to engage in certain practices that are considered unfair or deceptive. It also has set up obligations for businesses to follow when they use e-mail to advertise goods, services, and information. The sender of commercial e-mail must now clearly and conspicuously identify the massage as an advertisement or solicitation, provide a valid and functioning e-mail address or other Internet-based way by which the recipient can stop receiving further messages, must give the recipient a lear and conspicuous notice of the right to stop further messages, and must include the sender's valid postal address.

In interstate or foreign commerce, the sender is prohibited from accessing a computer without permission and intentionally using it to send multiple commercial e-mail messages, using a computer to send such messages with the intent to deceive or mislead, falsifying header information, misrepresenting themselves as the owner of IP addresses, falsely or misleadingly identifying the origin of any commercial e-mail message, using a deceptive subject heading, and using automated methods of generating or harvesting e-mail addresses or accounts for the purposes of sending commercial e-mail.

While still too new to know how well it will work in the courts, it is a start to show that Congress has finally decided that spam is a problem requiring a federal solution.