Buried Under A Mountain Of Spam

By Leslie Walker

Thursday, May 3, 2001; Page E01

Losses are mounting on the front lines of the spam war. I sense it every time I open my e-mail inbox and see more junk messages than legitimate ones. Congress is agonizing over whether to send in reinforcements, but by the time any federal anti-spam law reaches our e-mail accounts, the war against unwanted commercial e-mail may have been lost.

Junk e-mail is a fast-growing and probably permanent fixture of cyberspace, despite the fact that nearly a third of the states have passed laws regulating it. Digital citizens would be well advised to take some control of their inboxes by finding out how and where junk mail originates. I learned my lesson the hard way, after being forced to abandon several e-mail accounts because junk mailers overtook them.

Lately I've been wondering if friendly fire from familiar merchants could wind up inflicting as much damage -- making it easy to overlook important electronic messages -- as the missives lobbed at us from fly-by-nights with fake return addresses like creditsecrets74@msn.com.

Software tools for blocking spam often have trouble telling unsolicited messages from those sent by merchants with whom we do business. The marketing industry contends there is a world of difference between spam (so called after a Monty Python skit in which a waiter chanted "Spam" so many times that it drowned out everything else on the menu) and e-mail from familiar merchants. But the two often look alike, and I'm not sure the differences are all that great. Indeed, I call them "friendly" and "hostile" fire, because both can be deadening to our limited attention span.

To be fair, legitimate merchants almost always identify themselves and provide a valid link inside their messages, leading to a Web page that allows you to remove yourself from future mailings. Many states require such opt-out links on commercial e-mail; legislation pending in Congress would do the same. By contrast, spammers usually fabricate their return e-mail addresses and include fake invitations to remove yourself from their mailing lists by hitting the "reply" button or sending e-mail to a special address. Doing either only confirms that your address is valid and guarantees you'll get more spam.

Unfortunately, both types of commercial messages are increasing in my e-mail accounts. During April, my Yahoo account drew three dozen pitches from familiar companies, many of which I never explicitly authorized to contact me. The total from familiar merchants nearly equaled all my "Lose Weight While You Sleep!" messages. More than half came from companies I have bought from before. Others were first-time pitches from firms offering few clues as to how they found my address. BMGMusicService, for instance, sent an unsolicited offer to join its music club, along with a fine-print claim that I had agreed to receive "special offers" from an unfamiliar company called Enterprise Marketing Solutions.

No one knows how much of all e-mail traffic is spam, but some analysts think it could be as much as a third. EarthLink, one of the nation's largest providers of Internet access and e-mail, estimates that 30 percent of the 1 billion e-mails sent to its 4.8 million customers each month is unsolicited junk.

EarthLink does a lot to block mail dispatched from well-known spamming sources. It also introduced a software filter called "Spaminator" last October that intercepts much junk mail before it arrives in consumers' inboxes and reroutes it to a special folder where people can review it. So far, about 1 million customers use the filter.

Yahoo and Hotmail, two free e-mail providers, screen incoming junk e-mail using similar filters and place messages in a separate "bulk" folder for each member's review. I've found Yahoo's filter does better than Hotmail's, catching most porn and get-rich-quick stuff. Both, however, routinely divert from my inboxes a fair amount of business mail that I consider valuable.

America Online faces perhaps the biggest challenge. Its more than 29 million subscribers receive upwards of 249 million e-mails a day and send nearly 200 million more daily. AOL tries to screen as much obvious spam as possible before it reaches members' mailboxes. Moreover, the Dulles media giant has sued more than 40 junk mailers and won judgments in more than a dozen cases. AOL offers individual filters through the keyword "mail controls," allowing members to block incoming mail from a particular e-mail address, AOL screen name or Internet domain.

One way to curb spam is to avoid publishing your e-mail address anywhere online. That's because unscrupulous vendors dispatch software robots that automatically scoop up addresses across the Web, then sell them to marketers. They also scour chat rooms and message boards, so it's best not to use your primary AOL screen name or e-mail address for chatting. Consider setting up a free e-mail account or special AOL screen name for such activities.

The Direct Marketing Association allows people to sign up at www.e-mps.org to opt out of unsolicited e-mailings from its members. More than 63,000 people have signed up since the opt-out service began in January 2000. But because most spammers aren't among the DMA's 4,500 members, this might be of limited help.

An unofficial spam-fighting group called the Mail Abuse Prevention Service maintains a list of Internet addresses known to have originated spam at www.mail-abuse.org. Called the Real Time Blackhole List, it is used by many Internet service providers to automatically block mail before it reaches their servers. The list contained more than 20,000 blacklisted Internet protocol addresses at last count.

In a debate that mirrors the one before Congress, MAPS is at odds with the marketing industry about what constitutes "unsolicited" e-mail. Unlike many marketers, MAPS considers e-mail unsolicited unless the recipient agrees in advance to receive it -- either by affirmatively clicking a "yes" box at a Web site or by replying to a message seeking confirmation that the person wants to be on a mailing list. This standard is called "opt in."

Increasingly, many marketers favor a looser standard called "opt out." It means consumers give their permission to receive e-mail if they are simply presented with the chance to opt out and fail to do so. When you register or buy something at a Web site, for instance, you might be shown a blank check box that says, "No, I don't want to receive any special offers" next to a pre-checked box that says, "Yes, I do want to receive special offers." If you don't uncheck "yes" and check "no," you are giving the site permission to e-mail you.

Many merchants stretch the definition of permission even further to mean not only they can e-mail us if we don't opt out, but their commercial partners can, too. They do this by adding "and marketing partners" to their "yes" box or by wording their permission box vaguely.

"There is a lot of confusion around what consumers are opting in for," says Jere Doyle, chief executive of an e-mail service called Eversave.com that sends people shopping coupons from local stores. Doyle said he sides with MAPS and requires that consumers confirm their choice by e-mail when they sign up with Eversave. He also believes Congress should mandate opt-in for all commercial e-mail.

Mike May, senior analyst for market researcher Jupiter Media Metrix, thinks one solution may be several years away, when Internet service providers could decide to charge a penny or more for each commercial e-mail they deliver to subscribers. Advertisers might pay more for better positioning in consumer's in-boxes.

Most e-mail providers have shown no interest in this idea, but I find it appealing. In effect, a surcharge would shift the financial burden of commercial e-mail to the sender. Currently, it is recipients and their delivery services who absorb transmission costs, under a model resembling postage-due.

Leslie Walker's e-mail address is walkerl@washpost.com.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

-- Anonymous, May 03, 2001

Answers

What really gets me, as was mentioned, are the ones with the subject "in response to your inquiry". Companies that have never, or could never possibly, get an inquiry from me.

-- Anonymous, May 03, 2001