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INTEGRATION WATCH: Spam Threatens the Way We Work
By Andrew Binstock
 June 1, 2004 — Plenty of ink has been spent on what we could or should do about spam. Most of it has been wasted based on the amount of unwanted e-mail in my inbox. The U.S. government’s effort to CAN-SPAM so far has resulted in arrest warrants for four spammers—one of which is in custody. Meanwhile, spam volume has increased by 40 percent.
What disturbs me more, though, is the increasingly limited use that e-mail now has because spammers have ruined the medium. For example, you can no longer blithely assume your message was received simply because you sent it. (Actually, you never could make this assumption, but at one time you could be pretty close to sure.)
Multiple obstacles diminish the certainty of safe arrival. The first, of course, are spam filters. Depending on whom you’re writing to, all sorts of words deemed offensive can force your message to be rerouted to “possible spam” folders where you hope it will distinguish itself from several thousand messages hawking impotence cures and weight loss schemes. If you’re on a spam “white” list (a sender known to be safe), you’re fine.
But what do you do if you’re e-mailing your long-lost buddy or ex-girlfriend whom you haven’t communicated with in years? Alex Neihaus, who runs marketing at Accurev, a tools vendor, points out perspicaciously that this specific problem will force people to come out from behind the keyboard and call people via telephone, like we all used to do in the old days. This warm, repersonalized world, however, is really just a way of recognizing the substantial breakdown of e-mail.
Let’s take it one step further. Is there any possible way that you could engage someone who does not have you on their white list on the topic of, say, which works better: Viagra or Levitra? While I realize not one of our SD Times’ readers would need this information, surely a close friend might. And yet no e-mail containing either word or a disguised spelling could ever pass through spam guards.
Finally, there is the problem of domain names. Those that contain the successive letters s-e-x are marked in many systems as spam. So if American Express had followed the lead of Diner’s Club and called itself American’s Express, its domain name—americansexpress.com—would preclude communication with its customers. If you registered online for Amex, you could never receive confirmation of your account. Auto-parts retailer, PartsExpress.com, recently suffered this rejection from spam filters, and it will soon change its name to the less desirable Parts-Express.com.
Attachments are a different kind of complication made possible by virus writers and spyware vendors who are spammers, too. Today, if you want to send a .zip file with an executable attachment, you will find your path blocked by all forms of silent software. The silent part is particularly vexatious. The filters, especially at large corporations, simply remove the message. They do not alert the sender that the message was refused, nor do they alert the intended receiver that the message was quashed.
Quashing a message should be an extreme measure. The addressee should, by all rights, have the option of accepting the message, attachments and all. But this courtesy, as well as the once-common alerts of nondelivery, are a nearly extinct tradition. On a similar path to disappearance are the request for notice of delivery and, slightly less rare, notice that the reader has opened the e-mail.
So, if you must send attachments, you have essentially two choices: Keep pestering your addressee to see if any of your multiple resends have made it through, or post the files on a private FTP site and have the addressee download them. As ever, there are ways to circumvent the problem, but each end-run affirms with plangent voice that e-mail is no longer a viable way for people or even machines to communicate with us.
I do not think legislative proposals will work, because the cost of prosecution of so many low-level criminals is far too great to make it worthwhile. In fact, according to MessageLabs, a company that sells anti-spam software, spam volume has grown by 30 percent since the CAN-SPAM act went into effect in the United States. A better solution, I believe, is to make spam unattractive by charging a small amount—a penny a message—for all messages beyond the first 30 e-mails in a day. Customer-oriented firms with large opt-in mailbases could use RSS or get a lower rate that is still high enough to prevent spammers from firing up the box.
Other solutions have been put forth, but many require creating a different Internet (unlikely soon) or new laws (too expensive to enforce). Whatever the means, businesses and ISPs must soon come together and decide on an effective solution that they will implement with all due haste. Otherwise, we risk the loss of this most important medium.
Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works LLC
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