Anti-Spam Forces Move Beyond Suits
If there’s anyone who hates unsolicited commercial e-mail more than people who receive it, it’s the network engineers at the Internet service providers that unwittingly end up distributing it.
Dozens of them gathered in Santa Barbara last week to share strategies for reducing the online scourge that is not-so-affectionately known as spam. The first Spam Roundtable, organized by Santa Barbara Internet messaging firm Software.com, highlighted how far the industry has come in combating junk e-mail--and how much more challenging the battle is likely to get.
An immigration-law firm touched off the backlash against unsolicited commercial e-mail in 1994 when it opted for a cheap way to advertise its services over the Internet. After all, sending an e-mail to one potential customer costs about the same as sending it to thousands of potential customers.
Ken Wilson, an attorney with the Silicon Valley law firm Wilson, Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, stopped spammer extraordinaire Sanford Wallace from sending junk e-mail to Concentric Network and CompuServe in some of the earliest legal battles. These and other lawsuits used claims of fraud and trespass to effectively shut down Wallace’s firm, Cyber Promotions, over the last couple of years.
“Sanford Wallace is off the Net,” said Ray Everett-Church, co-founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, or CAUCE. “But others are changing their tactics.”
Few things annoy Netizens more than a barrage of e-mails pitching unappealing products and questionable business opportunities. The Federal Trade Commission in Washington reported in June that it receives 1,500 complaints about spam every day.
But for Internet service providers, unsolicited commercial e-mail is more than an annoyance--it’s a major expense. At MindSpring Enterprises, a mid-size ISP in Atlanta, spam accounts for 20% to 25% of all incoming e-mail and ties up more than $250,000 worth of equipment. Erols Internet Services, another ISP in Springfield, Va., spends $75,000 in salaries for three full-time employees who deal only with spam.
These days, many spammers set up Internet accounts, quickly send a barrage of e-mail, then cancel their accounts and start the process over again. Such behavior makes it difficult for ISPs to block the junk mail as it comes into their systems since it originates from so many different addresses. As a result, roughly 10% of all e-mail on the Internet is spam, according to industry estimates.
Lawsuits are becoming a less effective weapon against spammers, said Wilson, who wore a tie featuring the Hormel lunch meat logo. It is expensive for Internet service providers to file a lawsuit each time a spammer strikes. In addition, their chances of recovering money from the fly-by-night operations are slim, he said.
After several failed attempts by junk e-mailers to police themselves, the anti-spam forces are hoping federal regulation will become part of a long-term solution. Roundtable participants expressed support for one bill sponsored by Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) that would essentially extend the 8-year-old prohibition on junk faxes to junk e-mail.
Anti-spam forces will also have to enlist technology in their battle. Suggestions included beefing up the process by which e-mail messages are authenticated and using micro-payment systems to force spammers to bear the cost of their messages.
Sunil Paul, chief executive of San Francisco-based Bright Light Technologies, a spam-fighting company backed by Internet guru Esther Dyson, said he is sure junk e-mail can be controlled if sufficient resources are marshaled against it, judging from the case of America Online.
“AOL has very little spam going from one AOL member to another AOL member,” Paul said. “That shows it can be done.”
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Times staff writer Karen Kaplan can be reached via e-mail at karen.kaplan@latimes.com.
