The FTC has told Congress that the CAN SPAM act is working. When I first saw this news on Thursday, I thought maybe there was something to it. I only had about 70 spams waiting for me in the morning. Today it was back up to about 130. That's pretty normal.

The FTC cited two studies in its report. One, by e-mail filtering company MX Logic, said spam accounted for 67 percent of the e-mail passing through its system in the first eight months of this year. That's down 9 percentage points from the same period a year earlier.

The second report by MessageLabs, another e-mail filtering company, said spam rates rose for much of last year but have since declined and hover near the levels they were at in December 2003 — when Congress passed the anti-spam legislation.

There are several problems with CAN SPAM, the most obvious being that it's a law for an online activity that only applies in the United States. Let's just say those Nigerians aren't shaking in their boots.

As with most pieces of superficial legislation, the law was more about politicians backing a bill that everyone supports in theory. But this morning I realized another reason spam rates may be dropping.

I have been deleting spam comments from this blog all morning. (Why do people even bother? We delete them before they see the light of day.) This makes me think that while e-mail spam may be down, it's likely spammers are just spamming blogs, because that's what superficial legislation does, it makes the bad guys change tactics.

It's not just comment and trackback spam that's threatening to do to blogs what spam did to e-mail. AdWeek quotes research saying one in five new blogs is pure spam.