After a year of the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act of 2003, are we any better off? As usual, it depends who you ask and whether you consider the can half-full or half-empty.

If you missed out on the details of the law, here are the basic restrictions:

• No address spoofing is allowed in the TO and FROM fields (although BCCing is apparently okay)
• Subject lines cannot be deceptive
• Opt-out methods must be clearly noted in each email
• Commercial email must clearly be identified as such
• Postal and/or physical addresses must be included in the email’s body

According to MX Logic, Inc., 77 percent of all email in 2004 fell in the spam category, with the overall numbers increasing, as they are expected to continue through all of 2005. They are also quoted as saying, “on average 97 percent of unsolicited commercial email over the past year failed to comply with the federal anti-spam law.”

If nothing about that jumped out at you, let me add some emphasis. “On average 97 percent of unsolicited commercial email over the past year failed to comply with the federal anti-spam law.” Perhaps that is where this law was destined to fall short of intentions.

On the brighter side, compliance with the law is increasing, though admittedly at a slower pace than the growth of spam. Of course, that still leaves one feeling a bit empty as it’s kind of like saying more people were murdered last year but more were not murdered than ever before.

In the end, the solution will probably fall in the hands of those unwittingly responsible for most of the spam out there: Internet users. After all, zombie computers were responsible for more than two-thirds of spam towards the end of last year. Spam may not be the direct fault of end-users, but one can be certain that spam cannot flourish without their lack attention to what is happening on their own computers.