Fighting spam on all fronts

Email, originally hailed as the 'killer app' of the Internet is close to becoming the application that may kill the Internet, thanks to the overwhelming tide of ads for Viagra, body part enhancement and amazingly incredible business opportunities now known collectively as SPAM.

It is no small problem. I delete at least 100 junk emails a day, even with defensive filters in place. Multiply this by the millions of email users clicking around the net at any given moment and the scope of the problem becomes apparent. A recent study concluded that junk e-mail accounted half of all network traffic in June of this year. This translates into a lot raised blood pressure and billions of euro in lost productivity. One study estimated the cost of junk email to the world economy in 2003 at $20.5 billion.
It is bad enough to receive endless amounts of unwanted junk email. The spammers add insult to injury by faking the originating address of the email, or worse, hijacking someone else's e-mail server to do their dirty work.

Legislating against SPAM
The European Parliament voted to ban unsolicited bulk email a year ago. The legislation banned spam throughout the 15 European member countries. Most EU member states have also passed national legislation to ban spam. The issue is also a hot one in Washington, New York and California as legislators there try to meet the needs of businesses and individuals materially affected by email abuse. Indeed, some mass mailers have been taken to court and forced to pay fines. These efforts may help a little, but it is more likely that mass marketers will simply use offshore servers.

So, what can you do to reduce the digital deluge? Don't bother sending a few choice words in response to persistent spammers, your comments will either bounce into the ether or, perish the thought, your email will enter a list of people who actually respond to junk email, opening you up to an even great onslaught later on.
Along these lines, don't fall for the opt-out option politely asking you to fill in a form to get on a list of people who do not want to receive spam. Yes, you guessed it, you will get on a list all right, but it will be the one that ends up burying you in more email trash.

What can you do?
There are some proactive steps you can take to at least slow the flow of flotsam. Many email services allow you to create a list of friends and associates you do want to receive email from. Then you can log on and just look at that email. The rest will be in another folder. You can always add (or subtract) from what is known as your white list. If your email doesn't allow this, you might consider changing to a provider that does.
Most email software also includes tools to set up filters that allow you to exclude email from certain senders, domains or email containing selected words or phrases. This can help if your spam volume is fairly low, but it becomes futile if the volume is high. There are not enough hours in the day to update the filter to screen all the new offenders that appear.

There are countless software products now available that promise to help reduce your personal spam allotment. Some of these are even advertised through massive junk emailing. Some of these such as the Mcafee Spamkiller product (mcafee.com) and Spam Assassin (Spamassassin.com) may provide some relief. But real results will only come when the problem is handled on the grand scale at the server level where the email is being processed.

Large servers fight back
Larger providers like AOL and MSN are beginning to fight back with some clever software. This is understandable considering a recent report from AOL noting that they intercept 2.5 billion junk emails per day. The software intercepts all incoming email and quickly determines which email is obviously bogus. Email that may or may not be authentic is then sent a response asking for the sender to visit a web site and fill in a form with a string of letters or numbers, something an automatic mailing would not be able to do.

On the corporate and institutional level, spam is a huge headache for system administrators charged with keeping networks running smoothly. Companies can now avail of professional filter software, such as Brightmail, (www.brightmail.com) that can block 95% of spam. While Brightmail does not offer a consumer product, it does offer a list of Internet service providers that use its products, which could be step in the right direction for some users.

While the problems wrought by mass email seem nearly insurmountable at present, it is likely that the same talents that invented email and the Internet will devise strategies to deal with these challenges effectively. One can only hope this will happen sooner rather than later.

@ escrs.org
Meanwhile, help is at hand, at least for ESCRS members. After much research and experimentation, we've installed an email server that will provide free email services for all members. Once you sign up, you can use your impressive soandso@escrs.org email anywhere. It can be accessed through any browser. It is fully functional, allowing you to send and receive messages and attachments in a secure setting. We will make every effort to keep the evil spammers from hijacking our email system. If you are an ESCRS member and would like more information, contact us at escrs@agenda-comm.ie, placing the term 'email' in the subject heading.

PS- If all of this talk about spam is making you nostalgic for a certain canned meat product, steer your browser over to the original, the one and only, Spam information site, at www.spam.com. Bon appetit!

Comments or suggestions for this column? Drop me a line at primesite@press1.com

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