The scene is familiar: An e-mail inbox, overflowing with credit-card solicitations, Nigerian financial scams, weight-loss product pitches and adult-oriented opportunities. Welcome! You’ve got spam. And this kind of spam is not canned luncheon meat — it’s unsolicited, usually bulk, e-mail.

Due to the nature of Internet technology, each e-mail message, from legitimate bid proposals to “Make Money Fast!” bulk offers, costs the recipient more than it costs the sender in terms of money and resources, reports the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. This is because, while an e-mail can be sent to thousands of recipients in an instant, each recipient much take the time to download each e-mail, sort it, read it and discard it.

Beyond the technology issues, companies should be concerned about messages that are inappropriate, if not downright offensive, in a business environment. Spammers can forge the “from” fields of e-mails, embarassing recipients or compromising business relationships.

“As for sending spam, the mail may come from you, or it may not,” says Bill Cheswick, chief scientist for Lumeta Corp., a network security firm in Somerset, N.H. “The return addresses in e-mail are easily forged. Though e-mail almost always comes from the party you think it does, it [isn’t] necessarily so. In that respect, you can’t stop people from sending e-mail that appears to come from you, though an expert usually can figure it out from the mail headers and logs.”

Viruses, too, can infect e-mail programs and send themselves to everyone in an address book — including top clients. This could present a problem for BSCs if their customers receive an e-mail that appears to be from them, promising medical cures, get-rich-quick schemes or worse, pornography, especially if it spreads rapidly and clogs the customers’ servers. If customers complain that your company sent them inappropriate e-mail, work with them to find out the source.

Fighting spam
There are filtering devices and blocks designed to keep unwanted e-mails out of inboxes. Most filters work using simple keyword approaches, blocking e-mails with titles such as “free,” “urgent assistance needed” or “dear friend.” Unfortunately, this can result in stopping bona fide messages from getting through. For instance, if a customer titles his e-mail “urgent assistance needed” because a big spill needs attention, that filter could block it. Likewise, spammers are becoming more sophisticated, and figuring out and omitting keywords.

Some anti-spam sites have started collecting spam from the public to use as an online library for programmers and researchers to use in their fight; one site, spamarchive.org, receives approximately 5,000 messages a day.

The Federal Trade Commission has compiled about 23 million junk e-mail messages, which it uses for fraud investigations and consumer education campaigns. But, the commission only can take action if spammers defraud customers or solicit illegal activity. Twenty-six states have laws that curb spam by outlawing false return addresses and requiring marketers to identify advertisements with labels such as “adv:” in a message’s subject line. But those restrictions are weak.

“There are no federal laws, and a modest number of state laws,” says John Levine, author of The Internet for Dummies. “Most of the state laws aren’t drafted well and are ineffective.”

For example, Wisconsin’s merely says that [pornographic] spam has to have ADULT ADVERTISEMENT in the subject line, Levine says.

Also, spam often is sent from overseas, where U.S. law doesn’t reach.

Legal remedies
If you want to take legal action against a spammer, first find out if there are any laws in your state that apply.

One site to review is law.spamcon.org, which keeps track of current and proposed state laws.

If you don’t have any legal options, then at the very least you can complain to the spammer’s Internet service provider so that you can get their account cancelled. This only works if the spammer’s return address is legitimate.

“In the long run, the best way to reduce spam is to pass effective anti-spam laws,” Levine says. “In the short run, mail filters and blocking lists, or lists of Internet addresses with a history of sending spam, can be somewhat effective in limiting the spam you get.”

Spam-Busting Web Sites

  • Find a step-by-step guide at Internet Privacy for Dummies
  • Learn how to track spammers and complain to their Internet providers with “Tracking Spam”
  • Send your unsolicited e-mail to Spam Cop
  • E-mail Abuse wants to end all forms of unethical e-mail.
  • Junkbusters is dedicated to stopping unwanted electronic and paper mail.




    POSTED ON: 1/1/2003