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Drowning In A Sea Of Spam
15 January 2003

"Go from Rags to Riches." "Lose Weight and Look Great." "Having Trouble Satisfying Women?" These are just three of the 150 spam e-mail message headers received by this writer within five days.

Spam (or junk mail) - defined as "unsolicited, automated e-mail, often of a commercial nature" by Dictionary.com - is reaching epidemic proportions as missives touting everything from pornography to cut price car insurance are hitting individual and corporate inboxes with increasing voracity.

Technology research firm Gartner estimates that 11m spam e-mails are sent every day. According to anti-spam technology firm Brightmail, 38 per cent of all e-mail received today is junk mail, compared to 8 per cent a year ago.

The growth of spam is creating a number of repercussions. Most obviously, home and business computer users are becoming increasingly intolerant of junk e-mail. "The volume of spam has increased four-fold over the past year and complaints have risen ten-fold," says Jonathan Penn, a director in IT advisory firm Giga Information Group's security research department.

From a business perspective, spam is more than just an inconvenience. "At best, spam is annoying; at worst, it's objectionable and a real threat to productivity and resources," says Steve Cullen, senior vice president, consumer and client product delivery at Internet security company Symantec. Lost productivity is certainly an issue for companies, especially for those that do not impose rigorous e-mail and website filtering policies. In a recent Symantec study, close to a quarter of the 1,000 people surveyed spent more than 20 minutes every day dealing with unsolicited e-mail.

Donal Casey, an e-mail security expert with the IT security company Integralis, believes that companies should take a hard-line approach to fight lost productivity and network security issues resulting from spam. "It is crucial thatcompanies clamp down on e-mail and internet use making it clear precisely what the IT infrastructure may and may not be used for, clearly flagging the dangers that each outlawed practice may pose," says Mr Casey.

Raising employee awareness about spam is one thing, but because sophisticated spammers are now able to outwit basic filtering and detection using forged headers and disguised identities, companies are also adopting anti-spam technologies to help them control unsolicited e-mail before it reaches employee desktops.
The number of vendors in this area has grown recently, with a battalion of anti-spam solutions on offer. With more venture capital funding being channelled into these products, Giga's Mr Penn expects the anti-spam market to evolve rapidly over the next 18 months.

Beyond implementing technological solutions and educating employees about corporate e-mail policies, anti-spam legislation is being developed worldwide to help outlaw junk mail.

In the EU, a 2000 Directive obliges providers of internet services to inform users of their contact details. There is no all-encompassing anti-spam law in the UK, but the Data Protection Act of 1998 generally prohibits the misuse of personal data and gives individuals the right to prevent processing of their data for direct marketing purposes. More recent laws, the 2002 Electronic Commerce Regulations, state that unsolicited commercial communication sent via e-mail must be clearly and unambiguously identifiable.

Meanwhile, in the US, 26 states have undertaken anti-spamming legislative measures. In California, for instance, senders of spam are asked to identify their communications by appending "ADV:" in the subject line and must discontinue sending unsolicited e-mail to individual users upon request. There is currently no legislation at Federal level, although the Federal Trade Commission monitors spammers who appear to be running scams such as selling non-existent products or services.

Some companies are winning legal battles against spammers. In the US, telecommunications company Verizon successfully sued e-mail marketing company Additional Benefits in Virginia in March 2001 for flooding the inboxes of its subscribers with unsolicited commercial e-mail advertising diet pills, online gambling, and other offers. In the UK, where, according to Keith Krasny, an associate with the international law firm Morrison and Foerster, a spam case has yet to reach the English courts, Virgin Net Ltd, the ISP arm of Virgin, launched a suit against one of its customers for sending nearly 250,000 junk e-mails through his e-mail account. The suit was settled out of court in Virgin's favour.

Despite these successes, legislation is only of limited use in the fight against spam. "Legislating against spam is like legislating against smoking," said Don Taylor, CEO of internet security firm, Clearswift. "Spam will continue whether legislation is there or not." One of the main problems with legislation is that a global network like the internet requires global laws to govern it. "The fact that a spammer may be violating the laws of different countries doesn't necessarily mean they can easily be stopped," says Mr Krasny.

As anti-spam measures abound, a question remains about how targeted messages from legitimate marketers can find their way through the blockade of anti-spam systems to the receiver. "Anti-spam legislators are pushing the limits," said Al DiGuido, CEO of internet marketing firm Bigfoot Interactive. "As a result, reputable marketers are losing out."

However, in one sense, the anti-spam campaign has made marketers more careful to target their messages to suit particular users. By only sending solicited e-mail with well-designed headers and by vigilantly obeying "opt-in" and "opt-out" requests from users, many marketers are seeing positive results.

According to Bigfoot's vice president of marketing, Michael Della Penna, anticipated and permission-based marketing has helped created a 200 per cent increase in sell-though. Mr Della Penna says: "Without the backdrop of spam, the marketer would not have been forced to look at content and relevancy of meaning."