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Marketers should bury their collective foot in the rear end of Barracuda Networks' communications department.

The Internet security firm certainly deserves credit for getting dozens of headlines from lazy reporters and editors worldwide at the close of 2007 by claiming that up to 95% of e-mail was spam.

But the press release touting that figure also implied the Can Spam Act has something to do with the criminal behavior inherent in the vast majority of spam.

And in a truly idiotic move, the release compared unsolicited e-mail to direct mail.

After alleging that spam accounted for 90% to 95% of all e-mail in 2007, Barracuda Networks' press release said: “This growing proportion is even more significant when compared to 2004, when the federal Can Spam Act, which set parameters for sending unsolicited e-mail and defined penalties for spammers, went into effect. At that time spam was 70% of all e-mail.”

Excuse me? What the heck does the Can Spam Act have to do with Russian criminals hijacking computers to send fake Viagra spam and Nigerian gangs attempting to scam people into handing over their bank account passwords?

Can Spam was enacted to supersede an increasingly byzantine set of state regulations while giving American law enforcement and Internet service providers the tools to crack down on the criminal spammers within their reach.

It has done both quite nicely. As of this writing, the Federal Trade Commission alone has brought 29 enforcement actions citing the Can Spam Act. Criminals are going to prison as a result of that law.

And in another inapt comparison, the release said: “Barracuda Networks also conducted a separate poll of business professionals and found that of the 261 respondents, 57% view spam e-mail as the worst form of junk advertising, close to double the 31% that cited postal junk mail.”

The only surprise here is that more executives didn't choose spam as the worst form of “junk” advertising. Direct mail is unobtrusive, pays for itself and is far less likely to be an attempt to advance criminal behavior than spam. Of course most executives prefer it.

Yes, some big-name brands still haven't gotten the message and send unsolicited e-mail — Kmart, Williams-Sonoma, the Smithsonian Institution and Colgate-Palmolive are examples I'm personally aware of. But for the most part mainstream marketers have embraced permission-based e-mail marketing.

The spam to which Barracuda is referring is not coming from Kmart. It's coming from criminals.

Asking executives which is worse, direct mail or spam, is like asking them whether they prefer shopping at J.C. Penney or getting scammed in a game of three-card monte. It's a false choice and the folks at Barracuda should know better.