Increase in spam is causing e-mail indigestion on the Internet

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By David Lazarus, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, October 9, 2002

So I get back after taking a week off and find my office e-mail basket spilling over with more than 700 messages. Several dozen were legitimate missives from readers and whatnot, and the rest ... well, you know where I'm going with this.

I spent an hour deleting message after message offering to improve my sexual prowess, titillate me with all manner of porn and help deposed Nigerian potentates get back on their feet, to name just a few of the more common themes.

And those were only the ones I could read. My volume of non-English spam is soaring.

I'm not breaking any new ground when I whine that junk e-mail is way out of control. The question I have is this: What can be done to stop it?

Not much, I'm sorry to say. At least not enough.

First, some raw data:

• Spam now accounts for 38 percent of all e-mail traffic, up from just 8 percent last year, according to San Francisco's Brightmail, which intercepts unsolicited messages on behalf of corporate clients

• Brightmail blocked a record 5.3 million junk e-mails last month, compared with 1.5 million a year earlier.

• An average 31 billion e-mail messages now traverse the Net every single day, according to market researcher IDC. That amount is expected to double by 2006.

• If current trends continue, more than 20 billion junk e-mails will be swamping inboxes each day within the next few years, clogging electronic arteries and overwhelming the machines that keep the Net running.

"It's a big problem and getting bigger by the day," said Ken McEldowney, executive director of Consumer Action, a San Francisco advocacy group. "A lot of e-mail systems can't even handle it."

Consumer Action was one of several groups that called on the Federal Trade Commission recently to crack down on spam, primarily by going after junk e-mailers using "unfair or deceptive acts" to lure Internet users into clicking open messages.

In fact, the FTC has been successful in the past in suing some bulk e-mailers. But the commission maintains that it can't go after all spammers without the go-ahead from Congress.

Congress, for its part, has yet to pass any legislation setting limits on how spammers can operate. It prefers to have the states take the lead in consumer-protection affairs.

Thus, a number of states, including California, have enacted tough anti-spam laws requiring junk e-mail to include valid contact info for opting-out purposes and a straightforward subject line.

California goes so far as to require the letters ADV to precede the subject so that spam becomes easier to filter out before reaching one's inbox.

Yet while Attorney General Bill Lockyer is already suing a Southern California firm for violating the state's anti-spam rules, how aggressive will he be in going after spammers in Wyoming or New Jersey or Florida?

What, for that matter, will he do about all those Koreans who have become such diligent cyberhucksters?

"You can't really control spam at the source," said Margaret Jane Radin, a professor at Stanford Law School specializing in technology matters. "It gets you into all sorts of jurisdiction problems."

Even if the United States followed the European Union in adopting sweeping anti-spam legislation, the fact of the matter is that the Internet knows no bounds.

For example, what's to stop Uganda or Uruguay or Uzbekistan from setting up extensive server facilities and refashioning themselves (for a piece of the action) as spam central?

What will we do when they ignore international spam conventions? Go to war?

Ambitious as various anti-spam laws might be, a determined junk e-mailer will always find a way to get through. "Everything can be gotten around," Radin said.

Meanwhile, attempts to regulate spam in this country run up against thorny First Amendment issues, and any attempt to limit free speech is a slippery slope indeed.

"Whether we like it or not, commercial actors have a right to free speech too," said Anita Ramasastry, associate director of the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce & Technology at the University of Washington School of Law.

It would be nice if filters and other technological solutions could stem the tide of spam, but as of right now (and for the foreseeable future) available countermeasures will halt only a fraction of all junk e-mail on the loose.

"At the end of the day," Ramasastry said, "there's always going to be spam."

Depressed? Me, too.

The only hope I see is that the economics of spam finally go our way as fewer and fewer people take the bait. This in turn causes junk e-mailers to go out of business because they're no longer able to attract clients.

The experts say I'm being optimistic. But I have another week off coming, so I'll just hope for the best.

-- Anonymous, October 09, 2002

Answers

I've been getting an abnormal amount lately as well. this after my IP announced they had put new spam screens up. Or whatever it was they called it.

Me thinks they are not working...

-- Anonymous, October 10, 2002


I'm getting a large number which look very legit. I mean, not the foreign ones, with weird names and oddly-phtrased subject lines, but real-sounding names and either no subject line or something that sounds very real. My rule now is not to open any mail unless I recognize the name. Of course with my memory that could be a problem, lol.

-- Anonymous, October 10, 2002

Man files $80 spam suit against Dole campaign

Wednesday, October 9, 2002 Posted: 1:21 AM EDT (0521 GMT)

DURHAM, North Carolina (AP) -- A computer consultant has sued the Senate campaign of Elizabeth Dole for eight unsolicited e-mails he received.

His price to settle? $80.

Ken Pugh, of Durham, filed the lawsuit in Salisbury -- where Dole's campaign committee is located -- based on a relatively new North Carolina law that allows people to collect $10 for each unsolicited commercial item they receive by e-mail, or spam. A court date has been set for November 18.

"It wouldn't have mattered if the spam mail came from the Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or Green Party," he said. "This is basically an anti-spam initiative on my part.

"To me, spam is an aggravation and a waste of my time. I am getting more spam mail than regular mail by a far percentage. I am testing the viability of the law to see if it really works and if I can get my money back."

It is unclear whether Pugh's lawsuit is the first test of North Carolina's anti-spam statute. Pugh said such lawsuits are difficult to file because many senders of unsolicited e-mail are out of state and cannot be found.

In an August 26 letter to Pugh, the Dole campaign said that its e-mails are not commercial and thus do not fall under the anti-spam law. But the letter said Dole's campaign respected Pugh's desire to receive no more unsolicited e-mails, he said.

-- Anonymous, October 10, 2002


It'll beinteresting to hear if Elizebeth doles out the money.

-- Anonymous, October 10, 2002

Leslie Walker Get Ready For the Obnoxious Online Ad Parade

By Leslie Walker Thursday, October 10, 2002; Page E01

Maybe the owl flying out of Yahoo's home page got to you -- the one carrying an oversize scroll inviting you to visit Harry Potter's Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Perhaps the Elvis ghost dancing around the Lycos network got on your nerves, or maybe the musical Doritos salsa ad playing automatically on Microsoft's MSN portal sent you over the edge.

But get used to it, folks. Web advertising is getting ruder and noisier by the week. That's because the Internet ad industry is in total turmoil, still struggling after eight years to establish standards for what advertising should be. As Web publishers continue their hunt for the Internet's version of TV commercials, we find ourselves with front-row seats in a long-running experiment that we can only hope doesn't end badly.

Now the show is about to get even more boisterous. Over the past few months, the leading Internet portals -- MSN, Yahoo and America Online -- have loosened restrictions on how much audio, video and animation they allow advertisers to display. That, in turn, is encouraging advertisers to experiment with even more interruptive formats, including video, talking characters, floating logos and animations that mimic video by presenting still images in animated sequences like flip cards.

"The hope is we can turn this into an effective advertising medium, which it is not yet," said Robert Rice, chief executive of Viewpoint, a technology vendor that AOL chose to help deliver rich 3-D graphics and "rich media" advertising to AOL subscribers. "We are still in the early days of deep experimentation."

As if words could help, the leading trade group for large Web publishers -- the Interactive Advertising Bureau -- announced a "terminology change" last week. It wants everyone to stop using "streaming media" to describe video and audio transmitted online and instead call it "interactive broadcasting," mainly because the group thinks "broadcasting" has more appeal to traditional ad buyers than "streaming."

But traditional media buyers remain resistant to Internet advertising in almost any form, which is a key reason Web ad revenue has been in steady decline since the dot-coms started dying. Nielsen Media Research estimates that Internet ad revenue during the first six months of this year was 8.4 percent below that of the same period last year.

The one exception amid the gloom is companies that provide software for producing ads in rich-media formats.

"We've seen 1,000 percent growth in our ad revenue in the last 12 months," said John Vincent, chief executive of Eyewonder, a small Illinois company that has licensed its ad technology for use at more than 1,000 Web sites.

Eyewonder specializes in repurposing TV ads online, using software that has a built-in media player so video ads can play without requiring downloads. That means people don't need a media player from Microsoft or RealNetworks installed on their computers to view them.

An Eyewonder spot that Unilever has been running for its Lynx cologne on a British Web site illustrates what Vincent sees as the potential of Internet advertising. Targeted to young men, the short video shows women in sexually suggestive poses, juxtaposed against brief scenes involving a worm, a frog and an old man in bed. The mystery and sex appeal entice men to hit the replay button, Vincent said.

"That ad never ran on TV and won't ever run on TV," he said. "The Internet allows you to communicate more precisely to a demographic you want to reach without having to worry about Susie, who is 6 years old, seeing it. You can appeal to John, who is 22 and goes to clubs, with more creative license."

The promise remains elusive, though, because even if there were agreement over which Web commercials work best, technical standards are still missing. An ad agency can send the same video to all the broadcast TV networks and it will look the same on air, but Web videos can't typically play on multiple sites because Web sites differ in the software they use and how ads should be displayed. Scores of Web publishers impose their own limits on the size, duration and transmission speeds of ads.

The result is costly for advertisers, which must reformat ads if they want to run the same Web video on various sites.

One vendor, Unicast, responded last month by establishing new standards for the advertising software it provides to 1,000 publishers. But the company's standards apply only to its formats, and even those are not entirely in line with standards released by the IAB.

Unicast is also trying to popularize names for the weird new Internet advertising. It recently proposed calling the various formats "in-page, over-page and in-between page," depending on how they appear on screen.

An in-page ad, for example, is where the video or other imagery stays contained in one spot, such as inside a horizontal banner or large vertical box known as a skyscraper. Over-page ads use imagery that seems to sit on top of the page you're viewing, often floating or moving from one spot to another. In-between ads are a proprietary format Unicast devised, called Superstitials, that load behind the page you're viewing and appear in a large window when you move to a new page.

My least favorite, though, is dubbed a "takeover" ad: It totally takes over the page you are trying to read, freezing it until the Web commercial finishes playing. Takeover ads often hover like alien spaceships and rarely have "click to close" buttons, making them worse than even those annoying pop-up ads.

As far as I'm concerned, any advertising that takes control of the Internet experience away from those using it might as well take away the Internet. We have had enough of that nonsense from the passive medium of television.

-- Anonymous, October 10, 2002



text only pages like this one will become more fashionable now. Just watch the speed of this server dwindle and you'll know. Not counting weekends when it fails completely.

I suppose if one downloads the special no-ad software and turns off images...?

I'm going to work now where the junk mail pays my check. LOL

-- Anonymous, October 10, 2002


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