Is spam killing email?

By Michael Fraase

Monday, 17 December 2001 08:28PM CST

Section: Internet

Make no mistake, I’ve made my feelings about spam (unsolicited bulk email) and spammers (those creeps that send UBE) abundantly clear (here and here). Unfortunately the spam problem has become so bad that it’s on the verge of rendering email useless.

In the last few months, I’ve taken to adding entire domains to my list of filters. If you send me email from your AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail account, I’ll never see it. I’ve blocked those domains completely. I don’t even feel bad about it. If you have something to say to me, use a real email account. If you have something sufficiently interesting to say, chances are I’ll add you to my exceptions list. Everything else gets unmercifully routed to the trash.

Am I likely to miss important email? Probably, but I have no way of knowing, and I’m not exactly losing sleep over it.

It pisses me off that I have to go to these extremes—I’ve even added entire countries to my filter list—to avoid having to read about how to enlarge my penis, refinance my mortgage, obtain Viagra without a prescription, and access child pornography. It angers me that I have so completely lost control of my email account.

Email was the Internet’s killer app. As few as ten years ago it was possible to correspond with a vast group of individuals you didn’t previously know scattered across the globe. But no longer. In a few years I anticipate not even having an email address any longer, unless things change drastically to increase the signal to noise ratio.

There’s little chance of this happening, of course, mostly because all indications are that spam works. Some percentage of pinhead users are responding to spam, or it would have gone away by now. Cameron Barrett has published a good overview of how to avoid spam, but it seems to fall on mostly deaf ears.

Spam isn’t just annoying, it’s expensive for both Internet users and service providers and very inexpensive for the spammer. For the average user, the costs associated with receiving spam include loss of productivity, diversion of time and attention, loss of online privacy, and the costs incurred by the service providers that are passed on to customers. For service providers, the costs are even higher and include the costs of dealing with unsolicited bulk email (in 1997 America Online estimated that up to 30% of its mailserver time was dedicated to processing spam).

Societal costs of spam are even more alarming. According to the 1998 Washington State Commercial Electronic Messages Select Task Force Report, between US$2 - US$3 of the typical consumer’s monthly Internet bill is for processing spam. A year later, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s “Falling Through the Net II: Defining the Digital Divide” report found that roughly 17% of all U.S. computer-owning households do not access the Internet because of issues related to cost.

Yet individuals need to be able to communicate with each other.

How do we balance making spammers bear the cost of processing spam while simultaneously encouraging individuals to communicate with each other?

I am now convinced that legislation is needed to prevent email from being relegated to the cyberspace landfill and see two important measures that need to be taken.

  1. The “junk fax” section of Title 47 of the United States Code (Chapter 5, Subchapter II, Section 227) should be immediately extended to include unsolicited bulk email.
  2. Forging any portion of an email header should be immediately made illegal. This is simple forgery and must be treated as such.

This is actually a simple, fair, and right-headed approach to dealing with this pox of a problem. Any First Amendment issues have been adequately addressed by the courts:

U.S. Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin:

“[Spammers] have come to court not because their freedom of speech is threatened but because their profits are; to dress up their complaints in First Amendment garb demeans the principles for which the First Amendment stands.”

Chief Justice Berger, U.S. Supreme Court:

“Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even ‘good’ ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person’s domain.”

These legislative suggestions don’t even represent a change in existing law, only clarification and a minor extension. Most importantly, they don’t impact the end-to-end quality of the Internet itself or its built-in nondiscrimination of transporting packets. Even better, it eliminates the necessity of the various controversial anti-spam blacklists to which many Internet Service Providers subscribe.

John Gilmore is an Internet pioneer that I greatly respect. For the past year or so, Gilmore has been having problems with his Internet Service Provider censoring his email traffic, partly because at one time he ran an open relay (an email server that anyone can use to send Internet email). Gilmore has accomplished many important things, and I truly enjoy the way his mind works. One of the things he did was form The Little Garden (TLG), one of the first mid-size Internet Service Providers in the San Francisco bay area that was perhaps best known for its human-oriented terms and conditions of service:

“TLG exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information passing through TLG. You are free to communicate commercial, noncommercial, personal, questionable, obnoxious, annoying, or any other kind of information, misinformation, or disinformation through our service. You are fully responsible for the privacy of, content of, and liability for your own communications.”

Ironically TLG is now owned by Verio, the company that is censoring Gilmore’s email traffic.

Gilmore is opposed to any form of governmental, corporate, or personal censorship and calls the spam blacklist operations—such as MAPS—“extortionists.” The spam blacklist operations block access to their networks by spammers and those who aid spammers. Gilmore’s point is that the terms employed by the blacklist operations are constantly changing. First they required spammers’ actual accounts to be terminated. Now they require that any service that aids a spammer must also be blocked as well as any web service mentioned in any spam. Gilmore believes that the blacklist operations are essentially blackmailers and their demands will continue to escalate until strong resistance is met.

The best source for information about the escalation of demands by the spam blacklist operations is Netside, a Miami Beach Internet Service Provider. Spam blacklist operations like MAPS are starting to meet strong resistance. In October, MAPS settled lawsuits brought against it with both Exactis and Experian. Unfortunately, this has done nothing to stem the tide of spam or increase individual communication.

There is, arguably, need for open relays. Think about those who travel and use a different service provider while on the road being unable to connect to their “home” network’s email server. Think about the Internet Service Provider that has clients that are geographically dispersed. Think about open relays making email that needs to be legitimately anonymous—whistle-blowers, for instance—much harder to trace.

Lawrence Lessig wrote a seminal article about spam wars in the Industry Standard three years ago. Hewlett-Packard had subscribed to one of the spam blacklist operations and was blocking all email from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) because it ran a limited open relay. MIT retaliated by blocking all email from Hewlett-Packard. Things escalated and got messy but were finally resolved.

One of the more interesting potential spam solutions is Brightmail, a filtering service that has gotten good reviews. Sendmail carried an interview with Brightmail’s Tim Pozar that sheds significant light on Brightmail’s approach to the spam situation. The problem with Brightmail—and solutions like it—is that it imposes an additional cost on Internet users, when the cost of spam processing should be on the spammer. Nevertheless, services like Brightmail may prove worthwhile.

Without the appropriate legislation outlined above, email will die a slow, painful death and will eventually suffer the most ignoble of Internet fates: irrelevance. And until then, the unfortunate chances are that I probably won’t hear what you have to say.

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