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Anti-Spammers Get Serious |
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America Online is mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore. On Apr. 15, the country's biggest Internet service provider (ISP) announced a round of five lawsuits against notorious spammers. The suits seek at least $10 million in civil damages and court orders to halt the junk-mail barrage. AOL (AOL ) has also sent out over 100 cease-and-desist letters to alleged spammers. On the technology side, it has upgraded its spam-blocking systems to try to prevent much of the unwanted e-mail from hitting customer inboxes and gumming up AOL's servers. "Spammers take note: You can run, but you can't hide," says Randall Boe, AOL's general counsel.
This is the second round of lawsuits that AOL has filed against spammers in the past two years. And it's just one of a handful of anti-spam efforts coalescing this spring. On Apr. 11, U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) reintroduced the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography & Marketing) Act. The bill mandates stiff financial penalties and heavy jail time for anyone who spams using invalid or fake e-mail addresses.
Even the staid professional body that sets technology standards for the Internet is getting involved. In March, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) started an anti-spam working group. This brain trust of spam-fighting notables will recommend ways that ISPs and other operators of key Internet infrastructure can reduce junk traffic. At the same time an increasing number of ISPs and big companies are adopting anti-spam technologies to help their employees evade the never-ending barrage.
BILLIONS SERVED. Behind the multipronged attack is the growing realization that spam is now not just a nuisance but also a major unwanted cost. What's more, spam may well be on the brink of making e-mail nearly unusable.
According to CEO Enrique Salem of BrightMail, one of the largest anti-spam service providers, his company processed 55 billion messages in March, 2003. Salem says in 2001 when BrightMail launched, about 8% of the messages it processed were spam. In January, 2001, that tally hit 41%, meaning 4 out of every 10 messages traveling over the Internet early this year were probably Spam.
But wait. Salem says by March, the percentage had hit 45%. Using that math, with spam increasing at 2% per month, by yearend 63% of all messages on the Net will be spam.
Story continues: Business Week
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