Spam is:
a) unsolicited commercial e-mail; b) a rather nasty luncheon meat; c) sapping our resources by filling our mailboxes, or: d) a great business opportunity for some companies.
The correct answer, of course is e) – all of the above. Microsoft says more than 80 per cent of the e-mail messages it handles on its MSN network are some kind of spam, and they do try to block them. But, of course, we’re all getting far too many e-mail appeals to “get rich quick,” or “add inches to your garden hose,” or “help me get my $25 million out of Nigeria.”
Spammers are highly unpopular with Internet service providers, who try to quickly cut them off. Of course, the bad guys will just move on to another service, because, when you’re sending 20 million e-mails, there’s money to be made if only one out of 50,000 suckers take the bait.
Spammers also try to hijack servers and trade on the good name of established companies and organizations. A well-regarded Calgary non-profit has been going through hell recently because somebody sent out millions of porn site invitations with their domain as the return address. Just dealing with the “bounces” (undeliverable e-mail messages) has kept a pretty computer-savvy administrator from getting much real work done.
The latest wrinkle is that spammers are checking into hotels that offer high-speed Internet service, for the sole purpose of sending out their evil payloads. This has been a particular problem in the Ottawa region, and it may force hotels to tighten up, or even eliminate, their in-room Internet connections, which would be a real shame. Internet cafes, schools and libraries face the same issues.
How do spammers get our addresses? A six-month study by the Washington, D.C.-based Centre for Democracy & Technology found that putting an e-mail address on a web page or in newsgroup postings attracted the most spam. This is understandable, because there are spiders that roam the Internet looking for the magic @ sign and grabbing everything that looks like a valid e-mail address. These get resold on CDs with names like “50,000,000 Live E-mail Addresses.”
One counter-measure is to write your address in a way that only a human would probably understand, like “myname (at) mycompany.com”. Another trick is to use the numeric html codes so there’s no @ sign. There’s a free tool that will do this for you (see Web Watch, below.)
However, no gimmick will make you immune to so-called “dictionary attacks” where the spammers try every possible e-mail address. So you will, sooner or letter, get some spam.
In a sense, the current spam situation is a logical consequence of our desire for openness and convenience. If you have a listed, unblocked telephone number, you open yourself to dinner-time calls from house-painting companies as well as from Aunt Tilley’s lawyer, saying that she just left you the estate. An unfiltered e-mail address invites the same range of communication, except that it can be done at lightning speed with little effort on the part of the spammer.
There are some quite competent spam-filtering products like MailWasher, SpamKiller and SpamAssassin. People get all religious about these, so I’m not going to recommend one. Most will give you a free trial anyway, so go have a look.
Another approach is to define in advance who you WILL accept e-mails from, and block everyone else. You can do this even when setting up a Hotmail account, just by checking the “exclusive” box. This guarantees that “you will only receive e-mail from addresses appearing in your Contacts or safe list, service announcements from Hotmail, and e-mail that you have consented to receive from MSN.” But most companies are loath to do their business on a free e-mail service like Hotmail. For them, there are companies like Postini and Norada.
Postini takes advantage of the fact that, for example, lawyers get mail from other lawyers (and their clients) so there are predictable patterns of communication which “allows the creation of a ‘trusted network’ of senders who represent a significant portion of e-mail traffic in the legal community.”
In other words, a lawyer is unlikely to WANT to receive mail with subject lines like “are you happy with the size of your love tool?” or one that comes from happygirl225@blah.com Those get filtered out by what’s called Industry Heuristics. The Postini site also has a nice calculator so you can see how much spam is costing your company.
Calgary-based Norada allows you to walk away from products like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook and Act! by providing the same functionality in a sleek, fast environment called Solve360. It integrates spam filtering and gives a nice feeling that you’re in control of your inbox, just like back in the early days of e-mail. The free demo on their website is “live,” so as you walk through it, you see the latest headlines from CBC News, a report from the Economist, etc. as well as some fictitious sample e-mails. For spam-weary corporate warriors, an environment like this holds a lot of promise, and all for $9.95 US per user per month.
Norada claims customers in 92 countries and boasts some impressive reviews. There have been many attempts, including a bunch in the U.S. Congress, to pass laws against spam, and even put spammers in jail. All are pretty much doomed, because, like junk mail, spam fills a need. As long as there is anybody out there who will fork over a credit card to enhance their anatomy or make $3,000 a month by watching television, spam will keep assaulting our mailboxes. In other words, there’s a sucker born ever minute, and it only takes a few hundred to keep the spam kings in cigars and SUVs.
Web Watch:
CDT Spam Study:
www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml
Address encoding:
www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html
MailWasher:
SpamKiller:
us.mcafee.com/root/package.asp?pkgid=156
SpamAssassin:
Postini:
Norada:
