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The War on Spam

I wanted to start this article with a good joke. Surely I could conjure a chuckler about any number of topics. In the end, however, I couldn't think of a good spam joke. For businesses and individuals, spam isn't a laughing matter.

Bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, now accounts for an astonishing amount of daily worldwide e-mail correspondence. According to a study conducted in April 2003 by San Francisco-based Ferris Research, 2.3 billion spam messages were sent daily in 2002, with North American businesses receiving 53 percent of those messages.

Spam's financial impact is also significant, according to Ferris Research, a company that studies messaging and collaborative technologies to help people communicate with one another. U.S. corporations spent as much as $8.9 billion in 2002 to deal with the problem. Since February 2003, when IBM first deployed an anti-spam solution in its North American offices, as much as 58 percent of all filtered inbound messages are believed to be spam, according to Mike Halliday, e-mail architect for IBM in Southbury, Conn.

"We think IBM is getting around 800,000 spam e-mails a day," Halliday says. "It's a big problem, there's no question about it, and it's not just IBM. If you're a company that uses e-mail, chances are you're dealing with spam on some level."
 Dealing with spam has become such a priority for companies and individuals that it has given rise to its own industry. Spam-filtering and -blocking software and services have sprung up to combat the problem--and for good reason: without such software, there's a real possibility that traditional e-mail could be threatened, choked off by useless, unwanted, sometimes offensive, sometimes dangerous, digital garbage.

"E-mail has proven itself to be a valuable tool for businesses doing business and individuals just keeping in touch," says Rob Courteney, policy analyst for the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) in Washington, D.C. "But the proliferation of spam, particularly the offensive stuff, works against e-mail and makes it less useful and at times, even useless."

Why Spammers Spam

If spam is so universally reviled, why do spammers keep spamming? Quite simply because there's money to be made, and as moneymaking schemes go, there aren't many cheaper and less risky than spamming.

For those who recognize spam only as an irritating daily exercise in clicking and deleting, it seems inconceivable that some people actually respond favorably to these massive e-mails. However, for computer novices logging onto the Internet, spam is something new--a "hello" from an unknown soul who promises intimate happiness, claims to hold the key to financial freedom or makes other desirable proclamations.

"If people treated email addresses the way they treat credit-card numbers, they'd likely receive less spam. This may be the information age, but people should be vigilant with their own information." -Eytan Urbas, vice president, Mailshell

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