On this day in 2003 the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing, better known as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was signed into law in the United States by then President George W. Bush. It was the U.S.’s first national standard for the sending of commercial email, made in order to somehow control the growing deluge of junk e-mail at the time. However, the Act largely failed to prohibit many types of email spam and prevented the enactment of stronger anti-spam protections. This resulted in the Act being largely unenforced.
