A second consumer poll about unsolicited marketing reveals it's a lot easier to use federal sanctions to hang up on sales pitches than it is to use them to can spam.

The Associated Press-Ipsos Poll of 1,000 adults taken Feb. 16-18 found that 45 percent of adults have signed up for the Do Not Call Registry and 74 percent of those who had signed up were enjoying fewer telemarketing calls -- sales pitches made by telephone.

The telephoned pitches "decreased a lot" for 54 percent of those who placed their numbers on the registry, "decreased a little" for 22 percent and "stopped altogether" for 24 percent, the poll found.

Granted the Do Not Call Registry has been in place months longer than the new "Can-Spam (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act," but among those polled who said they use email regularly, only 17 percent said spam for them decreased. Most, 71 percent, said spam levels were unchanged, 10 percent said it increased and 2 percent were not sure if the levels had changed. Among those who said spam decreased, 50 percent said it decreased a little, 42 percent said it decreased a lot and 8 percent said they no longer get spam.

Spam is a sales pitch made by email, also known as unsolicited commercial email or UCE.

A Harris Poll found mortgage and real estate spam is among consumers' most despised forms of spam and seven of the FTC's Do Not Call Registry-related citations, issued since the inception of the Do Not Call Registry, have been filed against mortgage companies.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said 57 million phone numbers have been placed on the Do Not Call Registry, which opened last year and the FTC expects at least 60 million to eventually sign up.

The registry allows households and others to include their telephone number on a list that's sold to most telemarketers who must, in turn, not call those numbers for five years. Exempted are charities, pollsters and political campaigns, as well as companies that have recently done business with someone on the list.

Telephone number owners can relist their numbers with the registry at the end of five years. Violators can be fined $11,000 for each illegal call.

The anti-spam law, effective Jan. 1, 2004, prohibits spam senders from disguising their identity by using a false return address or misleading subject line. It also prohibits senders from harvesting addresses off websites and requires such e-mails to include a mechanism so recipients can indicate they do not want future mass e-mailing.

Violators can be fined millions of dollars and face imprisonment.

A Harris Poll, "Do Not Call Registry Is Working Well," released Feb. 13, revealed more than half of all adults, 57 percent, say they've signed up for the federal Do Not Call list and 53 percent of them say they've received far fewer telemarketing calls than before and 25 percent say they have received none since they signed up.

The Harris Poll was released just days before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled Feb. 17 in a 51-page order that households' right to privacy supersedes the right to free speech when it comes to telemarketing.

The AP-Ipsos poll also found that those who signed up for the Do Not Call list were primarily middle age or older, white and college educated registrants from the Northeast and Midwest, rather than from the South and West.

Most of those spammed, 95 percent, have never purchased anything pitched via spam, AP-Ipsos reported.

Published: February 25, 2004

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A journalist for 35-years, Broderick Perkins parlayed an old-school daily newspaper career into a digital news service offering editorial content and consulting services. Perkins' San Jose, CA-based DeadlineNews Group includes the flagship news site, DeadlineNews.Com, offering real estate, personal finance and consumer journalism, and a backshop, the Deadline Newsroom.