Internet giants join hands to can the spam - Business of Technology

Computer Technology Review, May, 2003 by Louis Raphael

Spam. The word alone is nauseating. We are forced to sift through it on a daily basis. And just like those gray hairs that my dad obsessively plucks away from the top of his head--the more we try to get rid of it the worse it seems to come back...until now. America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft have decided this month to put an end to unsolicited e-mails.

The amount of spam that is regularly released on the Internet is staggering. AOL has reported that it blocks over 5 billion spam messages a day. And if that isn't enough, Brightmail, a San Francisco-based anti-spam company, reported that in March, 45 percent of all e-mail sent was spam-up from 16 percent in January 2002.

Spam has posed a serious burden on the retrieval of emails. According to Brian Arbogast, corporate vice president of Microsoft's MSN and Personal Services Division, "Enterprises, ISPs and consumers are all spending time and money trying to rid their inboxes of junk e-mail. And the fact that valid messages sometimes get lost in the filtering process makes e-mail a less viable mechanism for e-commerce, which is a serious concern."

Spammers are clever little creatures, and are able to surpass the many obstacles we set up to divert them. The most common tactic is to personalize the messages as much as possible. They do so by either putting your first name in the destination portion of the message; or by assigning an 'RE:' tag to the message giving the recipient the impression that the message is a reply to a previous e-mail.

Many feel that these sneaky tactics border on fraud, which has led to a slew of investigations.

In May, the Federal Trade Commission released the results of its "False Claim in Spam Study," which shows an exaggerated use of fraudulent tactics amongst spammers. They found that out of 1,000 pieces of unsolicited e-mail retrieved from FTC databases and government officials' inboxes, 66 percent of spam contained fraudulent claims; either providing misleading subject lines, offering false deals or masking the origin of their correspondence.

In an effort to put an end to e-mail scams, several bills have already been proposed. In early April, a pair of senators introduced the CAN-SPAM Act. This act would make it a federal offense to send spam using a false return e-mail address. Similar bills have been popping up all across the country. In Richmond, Virginia, for example, a strict law was recently passed that would allow the seizing of assets and up to five years in prison for anyone who sends out at least 10,000 copies of a message in a single day, or makes at least $1,000 from one such transmission.

These legislations, combined with the help of ISPs, are anticipated by some to put a serious damper on Internet solicitation. "Long term, we hope to make it very easy for legitimate senders of commercial e-mail to differentiate themselves from spammers," said Arbogast. "And that, combined with more advanced and aggressive filtering capabilities, should lead to a world where we are less troubled by spam because the software industry and the legal system are working together to minimize the economic viability."

This all seems fine and dandy but one obstacle that will need to be overcome in the fight against spam is the fact that most of it originates from overseas. Insiders agree that the resources required to track down evanescent spammers are just not available. And that the anonymous nature of the Internet remains to be the principal hurdle in identifying those who choose to use it as a weapon.