Posted on 08/29/2002 4:50:35 PM PDT by GeneD
Corporate networks are becoming increasingly clogged by e-mail pitches for pornography, money-making schemes and health products, and there's little relief on the horizon.
Once a mild annoyance, unsolicited bulk e-mail--also known as spam--could make up the majority of message traffic on the Internet by the end of 2002, according to data from three e-mail service providers.
Businesses "are seeing an enormous increase in spam," said Enrique Salem, CEO of anti-spam service provider Brightmail. "It's become a huge problem."
In July, according to Brightmail's latest interception figures, unsolicited bulk e-mail made up a whopping 36 percent of all e-mail traveling over the Internet, up from 8 percent about a year ago.
Once considered a productivity-enhancing tool, sorting through e-mail has become daily drudgery as employees separate wanted messages from heaps of spam. Market research firm Gartner estimates that a company of 10,000 employees suffers more than $13 million worth of lost productivity because of internally generated spam. Add the Internet, and the problem gets much worse.
"A year, year-and-a-half ago, spam was an annoyance; now it's a productivity drain," said Maurene Carson Grey, research director for e-mail and messaging at Gartner. "A lot of the spam has become quite distasteful, and it's a drain...not just on bandwidth, but on storage."
Dennis Bell, director of information technology for Cypress Semiconductors of San Jose, Calif., found out just how draining the problem can be.
A year ago, he estimated the company saw one spam for every 20 legitimate e-mail messages; today the ratio is closer to one in four.
"The problems were mostly just a nuisance, but they were a large nuisance," said Bell, who decided to sign on with Brightmail because of his frustration in dealing with the influx.
Using anti-spam software on specialized servers, Brightmail can discern spam from legitimate e-mail. The software can also upload potentially new forms of spam for analysis, and develop recognition algorithms to identify and filter new types of junk e-mail.
Although spam still accounts for nearly 25 percent of the e-mail sent to Cypress, with Brightmail, Cypress employees don't see most of the junk messages. Without the service, "we would be getting so many complaints that we would have to find some solution," Bell said. Now only about 5 percent of the junk e-mail gets through.
Companies aren't the only ones suffering. Gartner believes that consumer mailboxes may be inundated with even more junk e-mail than those of businesses.
And the mess is likely to grow worse, said Steve Linford, director of the London-based SpamHaus Project. The nonprofit organization posts information about the groups behind the majority of unsolicited e-mail, and maintains a "black hole" list of domains from which spammers operate. Companies can block any e-mails from the listed domains, stopping a great deal of spam, but running the risk that legitimate e-mail messages may also be blocked.
Public efforts, as well as young companies with new technologies and services, have made sending spam a lot more difficult. However, legislators have been slow to enact laws that would help stop the onslaught, leaving companies and home users to foot the bill.
"It's an arms race," Linford said. "The more we lock (spammers) down, the more techniques they try to get around us."
Efforts by grassroots groups have caused many U.S.-based Internet service providers to crack down on spammers that use their networks. But, Linford said, unrepentant "spam gangs" simply start launching their attacks from other countries.
Brightmail competitor Postini, a relative newcomer to the business, found that spam made up 33 percent of customers' e-mail last month, up from 21 percent in January.
"There is apparently, because of the economic times, more of an inclination to use spam to drum up business," said Doug McLean, vice president of marketing for Postini. Earlier this year, the company released a study concluding that 53 percent of e-mail server processing time is wasted on junk e-mail and e-mail attacks.
MessageLabs, a U.K. company that offers services to stop viruses and spam, reports that its customers classify 35 percent to more than 50 percent of their e-mail traffic as spam.
"We are starting to get to the point where companies find it hard to deal with the Internet," said John Harrington, director of marketing for MessageLabs. "For a spammer it's a cost effective way to (reach people). It's cost shifting: Everyone else is taking the burden for these guys sending out 50,000 or 100,000 e-mails."
Spammers work harder
While the e-mail service providers believed that the hard economic times could account for the increase, SpamHaus' Linford said the trend was a natural result of an increase in new anti-spam technologies.
Such technologies have made it harder for the Internet marketers to connect with unwilling customers, so they compensate by sending out more e-mail.
"They are getting really bad returns, so they have to spam millions more," Linford said. "It's happening because it is nearly free to send e-mail to a million people. It would have happened regardless of the economy."
The increase in spam may be a blight for users and companies, but it's gold for the e-mail service providers.
Brightmail, which focuses on providing services to large Internet service providers such as the Microsoft Network and Earthlink, expects to double the number of e-mail accounts it scans to 200 million by the end of the year. The company's products already screen more than 2 billion e-mails every month.
Postini closed its third--and last--round of funding, for $10 million, in January, and the company processed its 1 billionth e-mail message in April. In addition, new firms are entering the market: MailFrontier closed its first round of funding this week, netting $5 million.
Legislation, rather than an arms race with spammers, is needed to curb spam, Linford said.
"We are hoping that the U.S. government will bring in a federal anti-spam law," Linford said. "That will take care of the majority of the problem." If the United States passed a restrictive law, other countries would be more likely to follow, he said.
"We will still have the spam gangs, but they will be doing it illegally," Linford said. "We would be running them out of business, or underground."
Of course, I don't give my email address to anybody that doesn't need it, so that probably has something to do with it.
That's actually an UNDERESTIMATE. I get about 150 e-mails per day of which at least 140 are worthless spam. BTW, one way I deal with it is by checking my mail via www.mail2web.com and then deleting from THERE all the spam. Then I open my Outlook Express to allow only personal e-mail to go in. Good way to eliminate viruses too!
Wrong. Spam exists because it's easy and cheap to do. Seedy companies sign onto spamming millions. It's very, very easy for me to grab domain names off the net. From there, I use a similiar approach to "dictionary attakcs" on passwords. I have a rather lengthy (and I do mean lengthy) list of "username"@x.com, or .net. or .org. or the country codes. I screw with my headers of the e-mail, and fire off 15 million e-mails across a weekend. Now a days, this is an archaic method. These guys "offshore" their servers, move IP's (networks), hit unwary junior admins and exploit old sendmail and misconfigured mail servers, not to even mention trick local ISP mail servers into cranking out 100's of 1000's of forwarding e-mails.
Try this sometime, make up an obscure e-mail addr at any of the major free webmail services. YOU WILL GET SPAMMED within 48 hours, even if you don't use the account at all. I hate spam for one reason only. It uses resources that it does not technically own...Think about this. You'd be pissed if 100's of vacuum cleaner salesmen were driving up and down your driveway wouldn't you? Well, you should, you are paying for that driveway. It's not theirs.
The alternative is a gubment solution which will involve a tax of some sort and loss of freedom.
That has everything to do with it. I have two mailbox accounts that come directly to my computer. One is the old one from my former internet provider that was acquired by a new outfit. It's chock full of spam. Eight of eight messages tonight were spam. My new one, which I've had for about six months, has one new mail in it. It's legit.
I learned my lesson. I never put my new email address into any website asking for my email address. I save it for family, friends, and private individuals with a need to know. I have never ONCE had a piece of spam in it.
Seriously, the problem comes from the essentially zero incremental cost of each email. That's why people aren't nearly as offended by physical junk mail as we are by SPAM email. I think the best solution is systemic: Change the mail protocol so that each pop3 mailbox can charge a fee for incoming messages.
I'm not sure how mail works exactly, but I think when you send an email message, your ISP's smtp server, which is usually running Sendmail, logs on to the pop3 server program that's running on the recipient's box. Let's say the recipient's ISP has set a $0.01 charge for each incoming email. The sending mail server could decide whether or not to send the mail to the recipient at that price. If they accept, then the sending ISP gets charged for the email, and presumably they'd pass on the cost to the spammer. If the sending ISP doesn't pay up, then their IP addresses go on a blacklist just like SPAM-friendly ISPs go on blacklists today.
The incoming charge could be set by the ISP, in which case it's part of their competitive appeal: "We charge less for incoming mail than anyone else - you'll get all your mail!" vs. "We charge more for incoming mail - you'll get less SPAM!" Or maybe the individual user could set their own price. I could set mine at 0.5 cents per message, or maybe I'd go for a full 5 cents per if I'm particularly proud of my address. Or my ISP could let me charge different prices for different senders - free for mail coming from Mom or from my subscribed mail lists, but a penny each otherwise.
Doing something like this would stop the SPAM problem very quickly. What little unsolicited email that remained would be a lot higher quality, since they'd have to go back to targeting their email lists to only the people who are most likely to appreciate the offer. Just like physical junk mailers have to do today.
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