Online Trust Alliance Finds Only 10% of Retailers Complying CAN-Spam Act

Theregister.co.uk reported on 18th September, 2014 quoting Online Trust Alliance as "one of the 10 world's largest online retailers are still violating the CAN-SPAM Act, acronym for 'Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003' even after 10 years of implementation of the US anti-spam legislation."

Online Trust Alliance (OTA), a non-profit organization working to enhance online trust, discovers these findings after a survey. They also found that 70% of 200 online retailers, who were surveyed, are making it easy for consumers to unsubscribe marketing emails.

The organization is not disclosing the name of the well-known e-merchants which are blatantly spraying prospects with junk mail and breaking the US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) of Canada.

The retailers violated CAN-SPAM Act by either a) not honoring the unsubscribe request within 10 business days or b) not having a functional unsubscribe link in their emails.

Theregister.co.uk reported on 18th September, 2014 quoting a Spokesman as saying "The Online trust Alliance (OTA) is not disclosing the name of the retailers who violated CAN-SPAM Act because the organization aims to recognize industry leaders instead of publicly shaming the companies."

The effect of 2003 CAN-SPAM legislation was to force genuine firms to think through their suppositions, partially as a method of distinguishing themselves from the multitude of hard core fake spammers. Spam remains a problem even today as it was in 2003 but one key difference was that users at that time were more amazed and outraged by the spam and today, most Internauts shrug their shoulders at spam even if bigger issues happen.

Thestack.com published news on 22nd September, 2014 stating that Richard Cox, CIO of The Spamhaus project, which has been collating and providing information on spammers since 1998, has not agreed with the findings of OTA.

"The objective of the bigger corporate backers of CAN-SPAM seems to reduce or eliminate any right of private legal action by victims of spam against those who spammed them. Only ISPs are allowed to take matters to courts and very few of them have ever done so because it's not worth the money as extracting actual damages from spammers becomes mostly an unproductive venture."

» SPAMfighter News - 10/3/2014