That damn spam
Unsolicited E-mail has become the bane of many corporations
Carl Shivers pulled a late-nighter last week. Not to finish up a report or polish a next-day presentation, but to baby-sit a new $40,000 computer system. It was designed to weed out spam, the commercial trash of the Internet, which threatens to overwhelm his Arkansas employer, Aristotle Inc., a small Internet service provider. Shivers watched nervously into the night as the system was buffeted with thousands of unsolicited E-mails, many of them from the usual suspects: unseemly pornographers, purveyors of the secrets to enlarging body parts, and the supposed relatives of various dead Nigerian dictators, promising a windfall.
By the next day, Shivers was breathing a little easier as the new system appeared stable while automatically detecting and blocking spam. "I feel like I've got my head barely above water again," he says.
It's a widespread anxiety. A minor nuisance just a few years ago, spam has mushroomed into a menace that some say could cripple the Internet. Reliable numbers are hard to get. Spam now accounts for anywhere from 20 percent to 70 percent of all E-mail. Whatever the percentage, anyone with an E-mail address knows spam is increasing--and increasingly annoying. Add in the time workers waste repeatedly hitting the delete key--most spend at least 10 minutes a day doing so--and the nation's annual cost is about $10 billion, according to one oft-quoted estimate. Spam is a postage-due form of marketing, with the tab falling on the recipient. It costs little to the sender, who can buy 150 million E-mail addresses for perhaps $100, and it costs only a few dollars more to blast a message to all of them.
Take that. "Spam is a scourge that benefits almost no one," says David Baker, vice president for legal and public policy for EarthLink, the nation's third-largest Internet service provider. Overwhelmed with spam, ISPs are lashing out. EarthLink has more than 100 lawsuits pending against spammers; America Online sued more than a dozen in the past week alone. Antispam activists are also lobbying Congress to ban unsolicited E-mail, much as it did with unwanted faxes in the early 1990s. The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, is convening a forum next week, the first gathering under a federal umbrella of all sides in the spam debate.
It's a debate because, unlike Internet viruses, spam is not so black and white. Civil libertarians worry that throttling spam will choke free speech, while filters and "blacklists," usually the Internet addresses of spammers that corporations and ISPs refer to and then cue software to obstruct, already make it more difficult for legitimate marketers to reach customers. "ISPs are overreacting," says William Park, chairman of Digital Impact, an E-mail marketing company whose clients include Hewlett-Packard and the Gap.
Online marketers say up to 15 percent of legitimate solicitations, such as those to customers or others who welcome sales pitches, get ditched. Blacklists come under particular criticism because their lists sometimes also tarnish nonspammers. The blacklist operators don't like to say which words in an E-mail trigger ire (they don't want to tip off spammers), and it can take days for a legitimate company to get off such a list.
advertisement
