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JULY 8, 2003
By Alex Salkever The Only Way to Can the Spam Most current proposals merely make spammers smarter and harder to stop. The real solution lies in stripping e-mail of anonymity Now everyone knows the war on spam is really getting serious: Bill Gates himself has declared war on junk e-mail. On June 24, the Microsoft (MSFT ) magnate posted his own call to arms on the company's Web site, joining Earthlink (ELNK ) and America Online (AOL ), two Internet service providers that have stepped up their legal battles against unsolicited e-mail. Disgusted with the rising tide of puerile and often sexually oriented solicitations flooding their inboxes, lawmakers in the federal government and state legislatures have also enlisted in the anti-spam brigade. You can almost hear Corporate America cheering along the parade route: Daily torrents of spam cost employees hours every week sifting through and discarding hundreds of pesky and/or lewd come-ons. Ferris Research, an electronic-research firm, estimates that spam costs U.S. businesses $10 billion annually. And sometime this summer, spam will grow to greater than 50% of all e-mails sent, according to spam-filtering outfit BrightMail. FUTILE EFFORTS? Spam haters are fighting back (see BW Online, 4/22/03, "Anti-Spammers Get Serious".) The weapons of choice so far: Spam-filtering technology from companies such as BrightMail and ClearSwift. Increasingly, ISPs are suing U.S.-based spammers to cease and desist. In Washington, Congress is considering nine different bills designed to reduce spam, including a proposed "do not spam" registry system similar to the "do not call" registry that telemarketers must now follow. Thirty-four states have anti-spam legislation that authorizes civil or criminal penalties against senders of unsolicited e-mail. So victory should soon be at hand, right? Not so fast. Unfortunately, these efforts are probably destined to fail. Worse, they could well have the perverse effect of making spam even harder to stop. Just as poorly used antibiotics help to create stronger bugs, the current scattershot efforts will likely create smarter spammers with more effective delivery methods. Here's why. Attacking junk e-mail in the courts and Congress makes for nice headlines and good sound bites. But spammers are already two steps ahead of the ISPs and lawmakers, who can outlaw practices only of U.S.-based culprits. Most have already moved offshore -- to places where foreign governments either don't care or don't have the resources to prosecute spammers. Does anyone really think that in Pakistan, tracking down a geek carpet-bombing AOL with spam will take precedence over tracking down Osama bin Laden? How about Colombia, with its drug cartels and insurgent rebels creating mayhem? Yet, these two countries are popular homes for spammers. BYPASSING FILTERS. Outfits such as BrightMail claim that they have a technological solution that will sense incoming spam and stop it cold. Apple (AAPL ) and Netscape offer nifty filtering mechanisms that allow a user to "teach" their mail program what's spam. The program then automatically filters out offending missives. These approaches, however, quickly become less effective as spammers figure out ways around them. Under the current system, a spammer's cost of sending 1 million e-mail messages is only marginally higher than sending 100. That's thanks to the flat-rate system for mail running on the Internet. To counter more pervasive filtering and maintain their click-through rates, spammers have begun to send out significantly more spam. It's a brute-force play on the mathematical odds, and it's already putting a strain on company mail servers. The second problem with filtering is that the better it works, the harder it becomes to tell real mail from spam. Here's the logic: Filtering will eliminate all the most obvious spam from your mail queue. But spammers aren't stupid. They have sophisticated mechanisms for tracking what gets through. Then, they tweak their messages to evade filters. Hence the rise of messages bearing perfectly believable subject lines such as "re: meeting next week" or "lost your e-mail address, please resend."
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