Spam crackdown gaining momentum
By Jean Latz Griffin
Contributing Writer
From the BusinessLedger.com
When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce met in Washington,
D.C., last month with dozens of lobbyists from
telecommunications companies, their mission was
clear--find effective ways to block spam.
Unsolicited e-mail, once considered merely annoying,
has grown to the point where it is seriously harming
business productivity. Employees must spend time
sorting through useless emails and Internet
resources are diverted from legitimate tasks. But if
the goal is straightforward, the best way to achieve
it is not.
Some anti-spam groups and
consumer advocates think the answer is more
government regulation, possibly something similar to
the 1991 federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act,
which prohibited prerecorded telemarketing calls and
junk faxes. Several bills are moving through
Congress and 25 states, including Illinois, have
anti-spam laws.
Others, however, including
major corporations and business groups, are lobbying
against more governmental regulation because they
fear that if anti-spam nets are cast too widely they
will unfairly restrict e-mail marketing.
"Absolutely, government
regulation could have an adverse effect on
legitimate electronic marketing," said Alex Bratton,
CEO of The Net Squad. "Until we nail down a good
definition of spam, any regulation may unfairly
block a lot of wanted email."
Bratton's Oak Brook-based
firm writes software to enhance the abilities of a
company's existing IT systems. One of its products,
Email Rx, blocks spam.
In July, more than
one-third of the 7.3 billion email messages sent
daily were spam, according to Brightmail, an
anti-spam service provider. If the current trend
continues, spam will make up half of all e-mails by
the end of the year, according to an informal survey
of Internet service providers by CNET, an online
technology news service.
"Within a year, it will be
a requirement to have some sort of spam filter on
your email," Bratton said. "It has already hit
epidemic proportions and it is just going to grow.
There is too much garbage out there."
One way spammers operate is
to send millions of emails to addresses with all
likely combinations of letters and numbers. Like
bank robbers, they go where the money is, so they
target members of large Internet Service Providers,
such as AOL or Earthlink, or companies that have
their own domain name and more than 10,000
employees.
Of 100 million possible
e-mail addresses, only 10 million may be real, but
e-mail is so cheap that it is still cost effective.
And, if the recipient clicks on the "unsubscribe"
button, the spammer knows he or she has found a real
e-mail address and sends more e-mail.
In September, the
Telecommunications Research and Action Center and
other consumer groups asked the Federal Trade
Commission to ban e-mail that uses a phony subject
line or misrepresents the sender to hide the fact
that it is an advertisement.
That would be similar to
Illinois' Electronic Mail Act, in effect since
January, 2000, which bans unsolicited email that
uses a third party's Internet domain name without
permission, misrepresents the source of the e-mail,
or contains false or misleading information in the
subject line.
However, even if stronger
state laws or any federal law were enacted to
regulate spam--and passed Constitutional muster on
First Amendment Freedom of Speech
issues--enforcement is a problem. U.S. anti-crime
resources are already stretched thin fighting
terrorism, drugs and corporate fraud and much of the
spam comes from outside the country.
"When individuals or
Internet Service Providers can take spammers to
court and win, or when the technology gets to the
point that nobody is even seeing spam any more,
that's when we'll see some real progress," Bratton
said. "At this point, technology is winning."
Experts say that the answer
will probably come from a combination of government
regulation of obvious abuses, such as pornography or
fraud, technological advancements and human
oversight.
"Spam requires a technology
solution because it is a technology problem," Ken
Schneider, chief technology officer at Brightmail
told The New York Times in June.
Many Web-hosting companies
and Internet Service Providers offer their clients
filters that stop spam before it gets to their
mailbox. However, the filters sometimes stop
legitimate mail, such as non-commercial mail sent to
mailing lists or mail innocently typed in all
capital letters.
One solution is to use a
scoring systems. For example, The Net Squad's Email
Rx program gives a point to each indication that an
email message may be spam--the message line in all
caps, certain keywords, a place to click to
unsubscribe. When a message reaches a certain number
of points, it is considered spam and rejected.
A new method under
development would look at all the legitimate e-mail
a person receives and determine what is spam for
that person by figuring the ratio of certain words.
"A physician, for example,
would probably receive a lot of legitimate mail with
the names of certain body parts," Bratton said. "But
those words in a non-medical person's e-mail could
be an indication of spam."
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