Spam volume declines, FTC reports

WASHINGTON (AP) — Those annoying "spam" e-mails for Viagra or low-rate mortgages that clog computer users' mailboxes appear to be on the decline, federal regulators said Tuesday.

In a report to Congress, the Federal Trade Commission said the anti-spam law that took effect two years ago has helped curb unsolicited e-mail. The report also credits advances in technology, such as better spam filters that weed out junk e-mail.

The report was met with some skepticism.

"For us, we have not seen one single instance where spam has actually gone down," said Jordan Ritter, co-founder of Cloudmark, an e-mail security firm based in San Francisco.

Ritter questioned how effective the anti-spam law has been in going after renegade e-mail marketers or spammers who can simply move overseas.

"It's a good law for people who want to follow it, but the real fundamental problem is the practice itself and the fact that people aren't easily tracked down," Ritter said.

The FTC cited two studies in its report. One, by e-mail filtering company MX Logic, said spam accounted for 67 percent of the e-mail passing through its system in the first eight months of this year. That's down 9 percentage points from the same period a year earlier.

The second report by MessageLabs, another e-mail filtering company, said spam rates rose for much of last year but have since declined and hover near the levels they were at in December 2003 — when Congress passed the anti-spam legislation.

Even so, the commission acknowledged that spam is still a major headache.

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On the Net: Federal Trade Commission: www.ftc.gov