Tele-miscommunications: unclogging the spam jam: unsolicited email is costing corporations billions of dollars in lost productivity, but so far, efforts to curb the tide of spam are having very little effect - On Site

Telecom Asia, Sept, 2003 by Tony Chan

An email from dasd@hjk.com promises 228 million Asian email address for a flat fee of $150--about $2.75 per 1 million email addresses. For another $100, the email's sender will also provide you with the software to send whatever marketing message your company wishes potential clients to see to those hundreds of millions of online users. Even if you make a penny per transaction and one in every thousand people out of 228 recipients buys your product, you still end up making $2,280, a return on investment of close to 1000%--and all you need is a PC and a connection to the Internet.

It is highly unlikely that many will rail for those types of offers, but there are enough people trying to exploit the Internet as a cheap and readily available medium to sell their goods that make unsolicited email, or spam, a major problem for end users, corporations and ISPs alike.

AOL says it blocks about 1 billion spam messages each day to its 27 million subscribers--that's a phenomenal 37 spam messages per user every day that AOL's computers must scan and block. On Microsoft MSN's Hotmail system, 2.4 billion messages are blocked each day.

"Spam is fast becoming one of the most serious problems facing email users, accounting for more than 50% of all email traffic," says Peter Moore, chief technology officer at Microsoft Asia.

While home users might feel annoyed with a few extra emails, corporations are feeling the pinch as employees spend valuable time deleting unwanted emails instead of doing their jobs. According to one estimate by US-based consultant firm Ferris Research, US corporations are losing $10 billion a year--more than a regional telco like SingTel earned in total revenues for the whole of 2002--in lost productivity as a result of spam. In Singapore, annual losses in productivity due to spam are estimated at between S$20 million to S$50 million, Saw Ken Wye, chairman of the Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation recently told the Business Times.

There are also reports that spammers are now using their messages to install malicious code on receivers" computers, including mail proxies that enable them to use that computer to relay out their messages without the user's knowledge. Last month's Sobig. F worm is believed to be the first confirmed case of a worm designed specifically for spam purposes.

Filters and blacklists

Despite the fact that spam is now universally recognized as a problem for the online community, it remains a problem.

There are plenty of available solutions based on message filters and real-time blacklists of sites, but the major obstacle is the nature of the Internet itself. Thanks to its global nature, it is often nearly impossible to enforce any kind of anti-spam legislation. In addition, the Internet is also legitimate tool for business and commercial communications--just because a message is unsolicited doesn't mean it's wholly devoid of value.

Scott Hazen Mueller, chairman and cofounder of CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email), an international anti-spam initiative comprising fed-up users, says that the biggest problem with filters is that many businesses are reluctant to implement them because they often block legitimate B2B enquiries.

"Filters pose a special problem for corporations because of the issue of filtering contacts that may actually be wanted," says Mueller. "Unfortunately, filters are the most effective tool out there right now for managing the amount of spam reaching individual mailboxes. What corporations do really depends on the volume of spam that they are receiving. Those that receive very little spam can continue to go undefended for now, but those that receive a lot of spam really have to bite the bullet and install filters."

Another method of fighting spam is through filters configured with real-time lists of spammers from companies such as MAPS (Mail Abuse Prevention System). These maintain a list of URLs or IP address that are know to have engage in spamming users, and systematically block messages coming from those sources.

Others like Trend Micro have implemented their own technology on top of those measures. Trend Micro's new solution uses heuristic logic that scans not just the message header or subject line, but also evaluates each message according to a set of parameters to determine whether or not it is spam.

Education half the battle

Despite varying degrees of success, none completely blocks out spam without the risk of blocking out legitimate emails.

The problem is that spammers are ingenious and are always exploiting gaps in the technology to get their message through. One of the biggest problems is that the SMTP email protocol is a very old technology, says David Sykes, North Asia director for software vendor Symantec.

One particular feature of SMTP is a relay function that mail server administrators forget to turn off, enabling spammers to hijack it to send out their mass emails.

Spammers have also reportedly used free trial accounts as the platform for their activities, which means that the origin spam is constantly changing, making it nearly impossible to stop.