Chicago (IL) - The Federal Trade Commission ambitiously introduced for May 19th its labeling rule, forcing marketing emails with pornographic emails to be marked with ’SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT’ in the subject line. According to security firm Vircom, less than 15 percent of such spam currently complies with the FTC’s rule.

The study of the company, which develops email security software, hardly can provide an objective picture of spam, since it covered only 300,000 pornographic emails. However, the result at least can be considered a trend : Only 14.72 percent of emails which should have been marked, actually carried the warning in the subject line.

"Of the rare few we found that actually complied with the new FTC ruling, most came from the same sources," said Marc Chouinard, head of Vircom’s SpamBuster Team. "This indicates that the vast majority of spammers who distribute sexually explicit material either do not know, or do not care about eventual legal repercussions."

According to anti-spam organization Spamhaus, about 200 spammers are believed to account for more than 95 percent of spam sent. Michigan-based Alan Ralsky, Colorado-based Scott Richter and Moscow-based Alexej Panov are believed to be the leading spammers worldwide. Ralsky and Richter insisted in phone interviews that they follow
federal rules such as the Can-Spam act and that spam violating US rules originates either from China or Eastern Europe.

Who in fact is responsible for sending spam violating federal rules, most likely will stay a mystery for some time - since typical spam is virtually untraceable. However, the US government recently increased its pressure on email marketers to comply with its rules by working with companies such as Microsoft.

Most recently, New York-based Howard Carmack was sentenced to 3-1/2 to seven years in prison when he was convicted on 14 counts of identity theft and forgery through his spam activities.