CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
American law to control bulk e-mail
The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 is a law passed in 2003 establishing the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail. The law requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions. Introduced by Republican Conrad Burns, the act passed both the House and Senate during the 108th United States Congress and was signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 16, 2003, and was enacted on January 1, 2004.
History
The acronym CAN-SPAM derives from the bill's full name. The bill was sponsored in Congress by Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden.
The CAN-SPAM Act is occasionally referred to by critics as the "You-Can-Spam" Act because the bill fails to prohibit many types of e-mail spam and preempts some state laws that would otherwise have provided victims with practical means of redress. In particular, it does not require e-mailers to get permission before they send marketing messages. It also prevents states from enacting stronger anti-spam protections, and prohibits individuals who receive spam from suing spammers except under laws not specific to e-mail. The Act has been largely unenforced, despite a letter to the FTC from Senator Burns, who noted that "Enforcement is key regarding the CAN-SPAM legislation." In 2004, less than 1% of spam complied with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
The law prescribed the FTC to report back to Congress within 24 months of the effectiveness of the act.
“CAN-SPAM Act of 2003” enters the record as american law to control bulk e-mail. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what CAN-SPAM, American and control can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5008702. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2003 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “CAN-SPAM Act of 2003” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.