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New laws and software fail to stop 'junk' e-mail |
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Confronted by an increasing number of individuals, businesses and Internet service providers using software meant to identify and discard unwanted junk e-mail - commonly know as spam - Sachs has been forced to become more creative in her marketing pitches. The subject line on her credit e-mail, for example, now reads get a fresh start.
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From a small office on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, millions of messages that Sachs and her partner prepare on behalf of others are still going out to e-mail in-boxes every day, promising not just to restore a poor credit rating but also to sell printer ink, 3-D glasses and, lately, playing cards with pictures of wanted Iraqi leaders.
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In the cat-and-mouse game of e-mail marketers and those trying to stop them, the spammers are still winning.
So far, nothing that has been used to block spam has done much more than inconvenience mass e-mailers. Just as Sachs' company, NetGlobalMarketing, has been able to reword its e-mail messages to evade spam filters, others use even more aggressive tricks to disguise the content of their messages and to send them via circuitous paths so that their true origin cannot be determined.
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There is no silver bullet, said Lisa Pollock, the senior director of messaging at Yahoo, the popular Web portal. There will always be people who can find a way to get around whatever you have in place.
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There is no doubt that making a living selling things by e-mail is becoming harder. Not only are more messages being blocked by automated anti-spam systems, but also more senders of e-mail messages are facing legal action. Last week, America Online and the Federal Trade Commission each filed suit against e-mailers that they say are illicit spammers. Congress is seriously considering legislation to crack down on spam.
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But the infestation is growing faster than the anti-spammers can keep up with it. Brightmail, a maker of spam-filtering software for corporate networks and big Internet providers, says 45 percent of the e-mail messages it now sees are junk, up from 16 percent in January 2002. America Online says the amount of spam aimed at its 35 million customers has doubled since the beginning of this year and now approaches 2 billion messages a day, more than 70 percent of the messages its users receive.
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The proliferation of spam is rooted in the nature of Internet e-mail. The system, designed to be flexible and open, is fundamentally so trusting of participants that it is easy to hide where an e-mail message is coming from.
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Another reason there is so much spam is that, with a simple computer hookup and a mailing list, it is remarkably easy and inexpensive to start a career in e-mail marketing. Companies that offer products like vitamins and home mortgages as well as those selling items like penis- and breast-enlargement kits will allow nearly any e-mail marketer to pitch their wares, paying a commission for any completed transaction.
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The microscopic cost of sending e-mail, compared with the price of postal mailings, allows senders to make money on products bought by as few as one recipient for every 100,000 e-mail messages. Internet marketing companies typically charge from $500 to $2,000 to send a solicitation to a million in-boxes, but the cost goes up if the list is from a reputable source or is focused on people in certain favored demographic groups. Sending the same offer to 1 million people by mail costs at least $40,000 for a list, $190,000 for bulk-rate postage and still more for paper and printing.
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Like many in the e-mail marketing business, Sachs says her e-mail blitzes are not spam because she sends them only to people who have agreed to receive marketing offers over the Internet through opt-in lists.
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Arguing that no one is forced to sign up for e-mail pitches, Internet marketers say that the attack against spam has already gone too far, interfering with legitimate business.
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We have allowed these spam cops to rise out of nowhere to be self-appointed police and block whole swaths of the industry, said Bob Dallas, an executive of Empire Towers, an e-mail company.
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But activists who oppose spam say that despite their claims, many spammers have not, in fact, received recipients' permissions to send them e-mail messages. This year, a state court ruled that a Niagara Falls, New York, company, MonsterHut, had violated anti-fraud laws for misrepresenting its opt-in permissions.
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Lower on the marketing totem pole than opt-in mailing is what the industry calls bulk e-mailing: blasting a message out to any e-mail address that can be found. CD-ROMs with tens of millions of e-mail addresses are widely available - advertised by e-mail, of course. These addresses have been harvested by software robots that read message boards, chat rooms and Web sites.
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Others use what are called dictionary attacks, sending mail to every conceivable address at major e-mail providers - first, say, JohnA@xyz.com, then JohnB@xyz.com, and so on - to find the legitimate names.
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Such distinctions, however, are usually lost on users who, in recent years, have found that unwanted marketing pitches are overwhelming their e-mail.
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As dissatisfaction has risen, the big Internet service providers like AOL and the purveyors of free e-mail accounts, including Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail, have all greatly accelerated efforts to identify and block spam. Among other things, they have created prominent buttons for users to report offending e-mail messages as spam.
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At the same time, e-mail users now receive spam that is not only unwanted but cryptic, too. In an attempt to avoid automatic filters that search for certain phrases, marketers offer, for example, Her bal V1agra.
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Another way that spammers avoid detection is to send mail messages using the HTML format, the language mainly used to display Web pages.
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Spammers and major advertisers alike think that e-mail with varied type and inserted graphic images is more persuasive than ordinary text. But the spammers also find that this format makes it easier to evade the filtering programs.
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Spam filters are now being adjusted to be suspicious of e-mails that contain only links to Web images. But it is still hard for any program to distinguish, say, a pornographic come-on from a picture sent by a friend.
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Big marketers favor limiting spam through the creation of a so-called white list of approved senders, but this raises the question of who will compile such a list. A group of the companies that send e-mail messages on behalf of major corporations will put forward another proposal this week that would allow senders to certify their identities in every e-mail message they send and report a rating of how much they comply with good mailing standards.
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Legislation introduced recently in the U.S. Senate would try to make many practices used by spammers illegal. It would force commercial e-mail messages to identify the true sender, have an accurate subject line and offer recipients an easy way to remove their names from marketing lists. And it would impose fines for violators. Copyright © 2003 the International Herald Tribune All Rights Reserved
Article/ source;
http://www.iht.com/articles/94142.htm
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