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CABLE TV DESCRAMBLERS. CREDIT CARD Merchant accounts. E-mail address spidering software. Credit Cards. Mortgages. Stock opportunities. These are just a few of the advertisements that have ended up in my e-mail inbox over the past few years. Needless to say, I don't want these e-mails so I normally use the 4-fingered salute within Eudora and they're nuked from my Hard drive for good. What I'm talking about is Spam. No, not the fake meat product sold by Hormel, but the term given to unsolicited commercial e-mail. Akin to Junk faxes and the numerous flyers that have appeared in our fax bins and mailboxes at one point in time or another, they are selling some product and we didn't ask for it. Dealing with junk faxes is almost non-existant today because of legislation that banned the practise, and the flyers that arrive in the mail more often than not get promptly dropped into the recycling bin without as much as a glance. Little hassle, and we don't have to pay for them. Spam is a little trickier. First off, the spammer (aka the person sending this stuff) typically doesn't pay for sending the stuff. They typically hijack vulnerable mail servers and then have them do the dirty task fo sending literally millions of messages across the Internet to unsuspecting victims. Hijacking a mail server typically ties it up completely for hours while the mail is being sent, causing service disruptions to the people who actually need it. In the process of those messages transiting the net, the bandwidth that could go to better purposes gets taken up and those who own the backbones pay for that cost. At the next end which would be the individual ISP's that host those e-mail accounts being spammed which have to pay for the storage of this stuff, and then we, the reciever is the one paying as well. We're paying for our Internet connections which may or may not be flat rate packages, the phone line, and the most important, our time. Give or take a few seconds per message and you can spend hours over a year if your e-mail address is on quite a few lists. For a few professionals who depend on e-mail for their business, this definitely imposes a cost. In addition, the ISP usually has to pass on their costs in the form of higher subscription fees. So what then, is being done to combat this evil stuff? South of the border in the US, there have been a few bills presented to Congress. Of the four presented, one was enacted into law which has little in the way of teeth against the spammers. You're required to "opt-out" of a mailing list, and the spammer has to honor it. However, most spam is sent using an e-mail address that the spammer knows will be dead in a matter of hours...So, the spammer never actually sees the requests and continues on. It also puts even more time onto the victim in having to reply to these messages, which in itself is not a good thing. Replying to spam only validates the e-mail address and guarantees the victim even more spam. Also, trying to use any sort of law against these individuals gets quite difficult as the spammer usually uses elaborate means to conceal their identity and location. Here in Canada, however, things are a little different. Bill C-6 which is to support electronic commerce while protecting the privacy of personal information is currently in the Senate. This takes the tact that someone can't get your e-mail address without your consent and/or knowledge of their taking it. Other than that, there's not much on the table regarding spam. Also, since it's still in the parliamentary process, there's no guarantees that the bill won't be amended to the point that it becomes useless in this regard. So while the continuing of Spam continues, what can we do to stop it? In short, the best way is to simply delete it from your hard drive. There are filters that one can setup to delete the stuff, and e-mail programs are becoming smart enough to find spam and to either label it or delete it entirely. Unfortunately, filters can sometimes grab e-mail (especially bulk e-mail) that you actually want! Time will tell what will truly happen to spammers, but it's pretty clear that they will try to take every advantage they can until they're legislated out of business. For the victims, that 4-fingered salute will have to suffice for the forseeable future. Source list: http://www.tidbits.com/anti-spam/ - Accessed November 24, 1999 Special thanks to Adam C. Engst, publisher of TidBITS for his assistance in my research for this article.
Numerous
subscribers to the TidBITS-Talk list - Accessed November 24, 1999 Special thanks to
Adam C. Engst, publisher of TidBITS for his assistance in my research
for this article. |
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