FTC recourse against spammers

Through my many weird little connections, I get on a lot of these computer hardware inventory lists, where people are trying to sell me some grey-market components at a discount. We don't buy stuff like this (especially not from sources like this), so I usually request removal and they eventually comply.

I had a guy recently that just kept sending and sending and sending - daily. And his unsubscribe mechanism - which I tried no less than four times - never removed me.

What to do? I could have just blocked him at our firewall, or flagged him as junk mail, or folderized him in some semi-junk folder in my e-mail program . . . but not this time. I felt the frequency of his e-mails warranted more effort.

So, I started looking into the CAN-SPAM Act. It's an act signed in 2003, which sets rules about what can be e-mailed, requires unsubscribe capability and other things. Clearly, this guy was in violation of that, but can a lowly Average Joe like me use this law in any way?

Yes, in two ways. One is that I could send a complaint to the FTC, via their ComplaintAssist system. Hard to say where these complaints go, and surely there's only a small portion that are actually investigated, but it's something.

The other way is the threat of action. In my fifth attempt to unsubscribe-by-e-mail, I let the spammer know (and copied the admin contact for his company's domain) that I would be filing a complaint with the FTC regarding his practices if I received one more of his solicitations.

The previous four e-mails were never responded to; this fifth one threatening action got a polite and apologetic personal response from him, promising to remove me from the list. I never did place that complaint, but the threat of someone willing to follow the process and use a legal system did the trick!