Solving the spam puzzle: spam has gone from occasional nuisance to major problem as it eats up more space in inboxes, mail servers and bandwidth pipes. With no silver bullet available, the only way to get spam under control is for everyone to take it seriously and contribute to the cause

Telecom Asia, March, 2004 by John C Tanner

Ten years ago, mention the word "spam" at a social gathering and the majority of people might think first of the food product or, possibly, a Monty Python comedy sketch. These days, of course, the first thing many people think of is junk email--hawking generic Viasra, porn, mortgage loans, weight loss schemes, and bogus cries for help from former Nigerian treasury officials--that now accounts for as much as 60% of global email, according to January statistics from email service provider Brightmail.

The second thing they think, most likely, is how much they dislike spam and would like to see it eradicated from the Internet for good. A survey published in January by consumers group the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) reported an overwhelming majority of more than 20,000 respondents said they wanted such messages banned.

They're not alone--enterprises, ISPs and legislators alike find spam to have become less of a nuisance and more of a serious and costly problem. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates the global economic impact of spam could reach $20 billion in lost time and productivity. That figure could soon include Lost online sales revenue--the TACD survey also found that 52% of respondents were shopping Less online or not at all because of concerns that any personal data they submitted would result in more spam.

Part of the cost is also related to IT resources, says Nick Hawkins, Asia-Pacific managing director of email tittering service provider Messagelabs.

"Take a hotel customer of ours, for instance," he says. "Up to 50% of incoming mail is spam, so that's 50% of their bandwidth wasted as well as 50% of email storage space. As the percentage of spam increases, along with the volume of total email, they need more more bandwidth and storage to handle it."

ISPs face the same problem. According to York Mok, chairman of the Hong Kong ISP Association, spam not only eats up precious storage space and both local and international bandwidth, but other resources as well.

"There is also an impact on human resources, such as technical people, and customer service representatives who have to answer complaints that the customer is either getting too much spam, or is having emails blocked," Mok says.

Meanwhile, the situation is only expected to get worse as the volume of total email rises. IDC says that the total number of email messages sent daily worldwide will grow from 31 billion two year ago to over 60 billion by 2006--only slightly more than half of which will be person-to person emails.

Little wonder, then, that more and more government officials spent the last year trying to pass laws to get spam under control. But that's proven to be tricky business--only a handful of markets have anti-spam laws on the books, and their effectiveness in combating spam is still being debated, particularly in the US and Europe. The US law, passed last year, is regarded as too weak thanks to lobbying from direct marketers, while the European Union law, passed in 2002, has only been implemented by about half of EU governments, sometimes with only small fines as punishment.

Meanwhile, Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates declared famously at the World Economic Forum in January this year that next-gen email technology would kill spam stone dead by 2006.

However, the view from the rest of the telecoms/IT industry is that it won't be nearly that simple, or that easy. For a start, some spammers have already latched on to virus and worm technology as more effective propagation tools--imagine a MyDoom worm whose purpose is not to shut down the SCO Group Web site, but to sell nude pictures of Janet Jackson.

Service providers are doing what they can to stem the tide--even though most won't say just what it is they're doing--but they can only do so much, and while most believe that spam is theoretically containable, the theory won't become reality unless everyone--ISPs, suppliers, governments and even end users--does his part.

ISPs in action

Considering the amount of spam that ends up in email inboxes, end-users could possibly be forgiven for accusing their email service provider of not doing much about spam. Not true, says Andy Lake, director of anti-spare service provider MailProve.

"People get spam and think the ISPs don't care. They do, and they are doing things to try and stop it, but spam is a nightmare to manage," he says. "They just can't keep on top of it because they don't have the tools or the flexibility."

Doak Adams, senior director of product marketing for anti-virus software company Symantec, which works with ISPs to set up virus and spam filters at control points, says that many ISPs are deploying technologies that use different methods of fighting spam.

"Most use the traditional methods, like signature-based blacklists and heuristic space technologies that look for certain patterns in the email that are consistent with known spa messages," he says.

Another technique, says Mok of the HKISPA, commonly used by ISPs is rate limitation, which limits the number of emails that a single sender can send to a large number of recipients within a certain period of time.