We've relied on a number of third party reports to be able to get an assessment of the degree to which spam makes up the email flows of Canadians. We get it in two ways. One is the degree to which we can rely on the senders to understand their practices, for instance, working with folks on the “Canadian Digital Marketing Report” or others that tell us about senders as well as some information related to recipients.
One year after CASL's implementation, for instance, there was 29% less email in Canadians' inboxes, and a 37% reduction in spam originating from Canada. That came from an organization called Cloudmark, in a 2015 study.
We have data from CIRA and Ipsos that indicates that 84% of Canadians who knew about CASL took advantage of the coming into force to triage the emails coming into their inboxes. The spam reporting centre has received just over 1.1 million submissions. We're trying to triangulate multiple sources of data to be able to get at the issue.
On the sender side, Litmus and others have told us, for instance, that 49% said that CASL had no impact on their email marketing program; they were continuing to market through email because they felt they could be compliant. Twenty-three per cent said that CASL had minimal impact, so clearly there were some shifts. Twenty-seven per cent said that it had a significant or dramatic impact, which means that, potentially, they were significantly addressing their current practices.
The data is third party, and by and large, as we say, we try to get it from a number of sources, to really get at the root of the issue.