Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, plans to convene a hearing on the effectiveness of the CAN-SPAM Act next month, industry sources said.
The Senate Commerce Committee hearing, originally proposed for this month and now slated for mid-May, likely will examine how effective CAN-SPAM has been at stopping unsolicited commercial e-mail since it took effect Jan. 1, according to e-mail industry representatives.
The spokeswoman for the Commerce Committee did not return calls for comment. The committee has not put the meeting on its official calendar.
Spam-filtering companies report that the flow of spam has been unchanged since the start of the year. According to Brightmail, spam accounted for 63 percent of all e-mail traffic in March, up from 58 percent in December 2003. AOL, however, said it saw a noticeable drop in spam volume beginning in late February and continuing through mid-March.
The hearing would come one month before the Federal Trade Commission is due to submit its report to Congress on the feasibility of implementing a do-not-e-mail registry modeled after the popular no-call list.
