The
following article is one of a series of articles on spam that will appear in
this and upcoming issues of Information
Executive.
Spam and Your Options
By Charles Oriez
It is believed
that sometime in March or April of this year, a major but sad milestone was
reached when the majority of the mail passing over the Internet was spam.
Spam got
its name from a famous Monty Python skit dealing with loud Vikings and a diner,
but the name probably does a disservice by obscuring the definition of the
problem. Spam is unsolicited bulk email,
that is, messages sent via email, to large numbers of people, who didn't ask
for it. The determining factor is consent, not content. A random Red Cross appeal to donate blood can
be just as accurately considered spam as an email extolling the virtues of
non-prescription Viagra. An email
advocating the re-election of George Bush or election of Howard Dean is just as
much spam as the mailing from Nigeria asking you to help an ex junta member's
wife embezzle millions of dollars. If
you didn't ask for it, and it was sent to you, it is spam.
It is even
spam when you give your favorite football team your email address to confirm
the on-line purchase of your season tickets and they think it would be nice to
send you special promo offers from their clothing store and an unrelated soccer
team. They never asked my permission to
communicate with me on anything other than my season ticket purchase.
Spam comes with costs.
When your
AOL mailbox starts getting too much spam, you change your mailbox. But then
what happens to customers and friends who have your old address and can no
longer reach you? Others change Internet
Service Providers as a means of changing their address. Anyone engaged in business will tell you that
keeping an existing customer is almost always cheaper than developing a new
customer.
When AOL
employs filters to block 2.3 billion pieces of spam a day, that effort comes
with a cost. People spend time analyzing
spam that evades the filters, and tweak them.
People spend time dealing with customer complaints, and even non-customer
complaints when the spam seems to originate from our ISP. If the spam wasn't rejected at the front
door, your ISP spends money storing it until it is delivered to you, and you
spend time downloading and evaluating it before deleting it, even if you delete
it unread.
Spammers
will tell you that you ought to opt out of their lists if you don't want on
them. Even assuming that they are
telling the truth (those who fight spammers will usually insist that
"lying spammer" is redundant phraseology), opt out doesn't scale. The European Coalition Against
Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (EuroCAUCE) is the
leading anti-spam advocacy group in
Another
cost is starting to show up as well, in a few courtrooms around the
The purpose
of this series of articles is to discuss some of the current options for
dealing with spam. Articles will include
a legislative overview, technology options for fighting spam, how to complain
effectively, a litigation overview, and how to perform due diligence to ensure
that your company isn't doing business with a spam friendly ISP.
That last
one can be important to you. As the
problem of spam grows, many ISPs have made the decision to block all traffic
from any ISP who knowingly hosts spammers.
If that is your ISP, it's your traffic that gets refused, while your
monthly checks help the pro-spam ISP stay in business and continue to support
efforts to fill our mail boxes with spam.
If, on the other hand, you want to participate in that boycott, or just
protect your company from sexual harassment suits, see the article on
technological solutions to spam.
Throughout
this series of articles, I make reference to various web sites and other
references, including both server and client tools. When I have the information
to do so, I have placed links to these information sources and tools on the
legislative page at http://www.aitp.org I also intend to start a thread on the Issues
and Answers Forum at the AITP Web site.
If you have an opinion about the effectiveness or problems of any
resource I've discussed, or one that you use that I have overlooked, take it to
the forum.
Charles Oriez has an MS-CIS from the
Looking for more information on Spam? Check out the
next two articles in this series, “Spam Legislation” and “Technology Options
for Fighting Spam,” published in the September/October 2003 issue of Information Executive.
The following article appears as one
in a series of articles on spam included in this and upcoming issues of Information Executive.
Information Executive Jul/Aug 2003
Copyright ©2003 Association of
Information Technology Professionals