Following CAN SPAM isn't enough to reach the inbox

One of the top entries on the list of things deliverability folks hear all the time is, “But my mail is all CAN SPAM compliant!” The thing is… no one handling inbound mail really cares. Seriously. CAN SPAM is a law that is little more than don’t lie, don’t hide, and heed the no. Even more importantly, the law itself states that there is no obligation for ISPs to deliver CAN SPAM compliant mail.

15 U.S.C. § 7707(8)(c)
NO EFFECT ON POLICIES OF PROVIDERS OF INTERNET ACCESS SERVICE.—Nothing in this Act shall be construed to have any effect on the lawfulness or unlawfulness, under any other provision of law, of the adoption, implementation, or enforcement by a provider of Internet access service of a policy of declining to transmit, route, relay, handle, or store certain types of electronic mail messages.

Many companies do list on their postmaster pages that they expect senders to comply with the law. (AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft). But just because email complies with CAN SPAM doesn’t mean it will be accepted or delivered.
Complying with the law is the bare minimum. And the way CAN SPAM is written it’s such a low bar it may as well be lying on the ground. Everyone sending unsolicited mail should be complying with CAN SPAM. But don’t expect the compliance to win you a path to the inbox. That’s just not how it works.

Did the algorithm change?
Another day… another shooting

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False positives are emails that the user doesn’t think is spam but goes into the bulk folder anyway.
Fales negatives are emails that the user does thing is spam but is delivered to the inbox.
I’ve sat on multiple calls over the course of my career, with clients and potential clients, where the question I cannot answer comes up. “Why do I still get spam?”
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This wasn’t some fly by night company. They had beautiful offices in San Francisco with conference rooms overlooking Treasure Island. They were profitable. They were spammers. Of course, not long after the FTC fined them, they filed bankruptcy and disappeared.
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Spam still exists because spammers still exist.
 

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