Spam works - Editor's Note

Communications News, Nov, 2003 by Ken Anderberg

The irony was almost palpable. There, on my Outlook screen, was an e-mail message offering a spam-blocking software. The e-mail was unsolicited and had a bogus return e-mail address, although there was an opt-out link available. So, in effect, I had received a spam message offering a way to stop spam.

Therein lies one of the most difficult aspects of controlling spam--identifying what is legitimate e-mail and what is not.

The Radicati Group says unwanted e-mail cost U.S. corporations about $9 billion last year in lost productivity. Within four years, the firm says, $198 billion will be spent for servers to handle spam.

We all hate spam (well, almost all of us) and it is costing enterprises and service providers, in particular, billions of dollars annually. Complaining about e-mail spam, however, is akin to baying at the moon. The situation reminds me of all the complaining over direct mail marketing, i.e., junk mail, not so long ago. Spam is today's junk mail.

Junk mail is still around, despite legislative action and regulation efforts. If you need proof, register as a new business. Within a day or two, you will receive offers for credit cards, office machines, janitorial services, whatever a new business might need. All unsolicited. Complaints about junk mail, however, have all but stopped, with our attention now on spam.

Exactly what constitutes spam and how much trouble is it, really? Do spam filters really save users much time, or are they simply a method for deferring the inevitable-one-by-one deletion of unwanted e-mail messages?

If you are like many companies, your Web server has some sort of spam filtering software installed. Are you confident that all the e-mail being diverted by that software is spam? Could there be important messages in the filtered e-mails?

Most ISPs currently offer their customers spam filtering, but once again the e-mails that have been set aside as spam need to be browsed for non-spam. Then you delete, which is basically the same process you were going through before the spam-filtering software was installed on your server.

Yes, spam is expected to account for 60% of corporate e-mail in a year or two. Yes, server capacity needs to be increased because of the growth in Internet traffic caused at least partly by spam. Yes, some spam poses network security issues.

Like junk mail, however, spam will endure. For most of us, it is a nuisance, but the reason marketers use e-mail is because it works. A small but evidently profitable percentage of people who receive spam, act on it. They visit Web sites. They buy stuff. Just like junk mail.

More regulation apparently is not the answer either. Already, according to the Federal Trade Commission, 70% of today's spam is illegal under one or more U.S. laws. Nor will requiring legitimate e-mail origination addresses or opt-out options stop the flood.

The Radicati Group says 52% of companies rate reducing spam their top IT priority, vs. 30% who say improving security is a priority. One can argue that those priorities are misguided.

Ken Anderberg

kena@comnews.com