Posted on 12/23/2001 9:05:27 PM PST by codeword
Would you like to lose weight fast? Would you like to make $5,000 a month from your home? How about trying some herbal Viagra, good for men and women?
Yes or no, you are more likely to find such unsolicited offers flooding your e-mail in-box these days than ever before, along with a free trial for professional teeth whitening, a low-rate mortgage and pornography of every flavor. Usually they come from unfamiliar addresses like "Debt Collectors" or Naughty Girl @hotmail.com, and often they single you out by name in the subject line, as in "Amy, Worried About Your Health?"
Such e-mail, best known by its pejorative appellation, spam, has been annoying Internet users for years. But in the last three months, spam has spiked.
One company that specializes in blocking spam, BrightMail, said unsolicited e-mail accounted for 12.8 percent of the mail its corporate clients have received since September, nearly double the share of the previous quarter. A spokesman for America Online, the nation's largest Internet service provider, said unwanted e-mail was the No. 1 complaint of its subscribers.
No formal count of spam exists for the Internet, but frustrated e-mail users are starting to tabulate their own statistics.
"I used to average maybe 10 a day," Shauna Wright, 34, of San Francisco, complained to an Internet discussion group recently. "Now I'm getting upwards of 9 or 10 times that much."
E-mail economics — it costs the sender virtually the same to send 10 messages or 10 million — have proven inspirational to peddlers of pyramid schemes and wonder drugs. Even some mainstream marketers have been known to lose restraint when it comes to e-mail advertising.
But for the recipients, it is not free. Deleting spam takes time. Important mail is sometimes lost in efforts to filter it. And just scanning through spam subject lines, which are often sexually explicit and may seem to mysteriously single out the recipient's own flaws and insecurities, can add a level of irritation to routine e- mail correspondence.
Critics say the deluge of junk e- mail threatens to undermine the utility of the Internet at precisely the time when anthrax fears and cost- cutting efforts have prompted more businesses to use it as a substitute for postal mail.
Marketers worry that people who feel constantly assaulted by junk e- mail are less likely to trust any commercial communication by e-mail, even from businesses they might otherwise be happy to hear from, like a retailer alerting them to a sale on an item they are interested in. To shield themselves from junk e-mail, many Internet users have become increasingly wary of divulging their addresses.
"The real downside is it makes people afraid to participate in electronic life," said Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization. "They don't want to post to a mailing list or go in a chat room for fear they'll be inundated with junk mail and won't have any privacy."
Some mainstream marketers are already beginning to see the effects of resistance to junk e-mail. Only a year ago, advertisers were raving about the response rates to targeted e-mail, which could reach as high as 20 percent. But that number is falling fast.
"The increase in spam has decreased the overall effectiveness of e-mail marketing," said Donna Hoffman, a professor of marketing and e- commerce at Vanderbilt University. "That trend is clear. Consumers are deleting it before they read it."
"Is it harder to get heard above the noise? It certainly doesn't make it easier," said William Park, chief executive of Digital Impact, which develops promotional e-mail campaigns for clients including Gap Inc., Fidelity and Hewlett-Packard that are directed only at consumers who have signed up to receive it.
Still, critics say some online retailers with well-known brand names also contribute to the problem by automatically adding customers to an e-mail list unless they specifically ask to be kept off.
United Airlines, Amazon.com and Martha Stewart.com, among others, all require customers to uncheck the "yes" box on their Web site that asks if they would like to receive e-mail from them — or, in some cases, an unspecified list of advertising "partners." Sometimes, it is not entirely clear that there is a choice involved.
The difficulty of defining spam is one reason efforts to pass federal legislation to stop it have foundered. Critics have compared junk e-mail to unsolicited faxes, which are illegal under a law that was passed when receiving a fax was quite expensive.
That law has never been challenged on constitutional grounds. And it is not clear whether there would be support for such a law for e- mail, which has become an important medium for speech of all kinds.
Is unsolicited e-mail with a political message spam? What about a request from a charity? Does an individual's right to protect the privacy of an in-box trump the free speech rights of marketers?
"If you're saying `unsolicited' is the problem, I would ask you to think about my favorite example: Here's a one-dollar coupon on Tide sent to everyone in America," said Bob Weintzen, president of the Direct Marketing Association. "I don't think too many people would be upset about that."
Still, protecting the free speech of junk e-mailers comes at a cost, both to privacy and to the bottom line, that appears to be mounting. Earlier this year, the European Union released a study that estimated the worldwide cost of junk e-mail at $8 billion annually. Corporations whose employees use e-mail regularly are having to spend more money on filters to handle the large volumes of traffic. And if every employee spends even a few minutes a day deleting unsolicited e-mail, the labor cost begins to add up.
Spam-watchers attribute the escalation to a combination of factors.
Earlier this fall, the Direct Marketing Association told its 5,000 members to consider using e-mail messages to alert customers worried about anthrax that real mail was on its way. Many of them have.
In addition, in a slumping economy, companies going out of business may be selling their lists of customer e-mail addresses to pay off creditors.
Mailing tactics have also improved. Online marketers have always culled addresses from Web sites, but with the growth of sites like eBay, the online auction service where thousands of people post their e-mail addresses, automated sweeps of the World Wide Web for e-mail addresses are netting more results.
Many now use "dictionary attacks," in which a computer automatically matches combinations of thousands of common words and names with long lists of large domain names (amyfritz@yahoo.com, amyfritz@hotmail.com, amyhar monfritz@excite.com and so on) and sends e-mail messages to all of them, much like telemarketers dialing numbers in sequence. As a result, even people who have made concerted efforts to keep their e-mail addresses private are finding their mailboxes stuffed with suggestions on how to make money fast or reduce their debts simply and easily.
"Everybody is saying they're getting more spam," said Les Seagraves, the chief privacy officer for Earthlink, a major Internet service provider that recently published a list of tips for customers on how to avoid unwanted e-mail. "Once we plug one hole, many more seem to open."
Like most providers, Earthlink tries to catch junk e-mail before it reaches the in-boxes of its customers, and it prohibits customers from sending spam. But that does not prevent junk e-mailers from signing up for free trial accounts and sending spam until they are kicked off, or forging return addresses to avoid detection.
BrightMail, a San Francisco company that sets up thousands of "bait" e-mail accounts to catch spam before it reaches its clients, is fielding an average of 25,000 unique spam messages a day, compared to 15,000 in the previous quarter — the largest increase it has ever recorded. Two years ago, the company found about 5,000 messages each day.
Some seasonal e-mail may subside after the holidays. And certain marketing efforts related to the Sept. 11 attacks, like those pitching nonprescription Cipro, are likely to fade over time.
But the overall level of junk e-mail is expected to increase. Internet users have received an average of 1,466 unsolicited messages this year, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, a research firm, a number expected to grow to 3,800 over the next five years. That is bad news for people who regularly shop online or post messages to discussion forums and already receive that many each month.
Indeed, e-mail spam may finally be living up to its etymology. The term comes from the Monty Python skit about a couple in a restaurant trying to order food while a chorus of Vikings sings "spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam," drowning out all other conversation.
Christian Jensen of Austin, Tex., finally decided to fight back. He wrote a program that blocks all e- mail to himself and the seven employees of the Web services company he founded, unless the sender's address has been added to a list of acceptable names. Instead, they receive an automated response:
"To confirm that you are a real human and not a spammer, simply hit `reply' to this message," the e- mail says. "Once this message is received on our side, the original message you sent will then be delivered."
For the less technically adept, a cottage industry of screeners has sprung up, including such firms as Spam Motel, Spam Cop and Spammenot.org. Some e-mail programs, like Yahoo's, offer built-in spam filtering for e-mail accounts, and others, like Microsoft's Outlook Express and Eudora, permit users to set up their own.
Marc Fest, 35, of Miami Beach, took a more drastic approach. Last month, he gave up his prize e-mail address, one he has used since 1996: marc@fest.net. People who send him mail there are directed to a Web site where they can send him e-mail, but they will not learn his new address unless he chooses to reply. Mr. Fest's daily e-mail tally has shrunk to 20 messages from 200. For now.
Eventually though, I'll just transition away from the old addresses. I can only see the spam for them getting geometrically worse -- my trusty old addresses have been shared between more and more spammers every year and that's a process that's plainly irreversible.
I told ya all to keep it a secret.
Perhaps you could conduct a class on how to do that.....
They say unsubscribing to them just makes the spamming worse because it verifies that your address is a legitimate email address.
Give us lessons. :-)
And the are right.
Never trust a spammer. Never. They are lying vermin, and the only thing your "remove request" accomplishes is to confirm that your address is active. It will then be sold to even more scumbag vermin, and your spamload will increase.
Unfortunately, it is illegal to take decisive action against the vermin. Hopefully this will change before they destroy email as a viable means of communication.
The problem is: real email sometimes get put in the junk file and you have to wade through all the crap anyway. Snow Bunny once sent me a card that was almost deleted with the rest of the file, but I happened to catch her name as I skimmed down the list. So, you can't just empty the file...grrrrrrr
(Invariably I lose whatever I won by deleting the messages unopened.)
The only people making money on the net are those who sell the hope to others that they can be making money on the net.
You create yourself an account like spam@whatever.dynamicdns.com and use that acct in public. As the spammers overwhelm that email address, you delete it and create spam002@whatever.dynamicdns.com. It's a little more work but it's quite effective.
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