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Sept. 29, 1997

Make Money Fast! Promote Your Web Site! Talk To A Live Naked Woman!

By Jason Levitt
ait! Don't hit that back button yet! The title may look like spam, but it isn't*. It's not hard to make this article into spam**, though. All I'd have to do is get a bulk E-mailing program such as Extracter Pro ($399), which includes the annoying WebWeasel, a Web crawling tool that builds mailing lists off search engines, news groups, and Web pages. Then I'd bulk E-mail this article to all the E-mail addresses on the mailing list. In a few hours, I'd have angered my ISP, gotten fired from the magazine, and proven a point: Spamming is easy. Too easy.
The simplicity of spamming comes at a high price to both end users and Internet service providers. Unlike bulk snail mail***, where the sender pays hefty fees to have the mail distributed to your doorstep, spammers use the Internet's high-speed backbones to send their noxious loads to every corner of the virtual universe-- and they don't pay a cent. You and I, and the ISPs, shoulder the costs, in the form of connect time charges, lost productivity, disk-storage space usage, and network bandwidth.
This is quite a distasteful situation. It's frustrating. And the worst part is that there are no easy solutions. For end-users with E-mail, and even for IT professionals who manage E-mail servers, there are no preventative measures that work really well, nor are there likely to be any good technical solutions in the near future. Filtering by domain name has been the most successful approach, but although large lists of known spamming domains are available, sophisticated spammers simply put bogus domains in mail headers. The origin of the spam isn't recognized by the mail filters and E-mail gateways that might attempt to filter out known spamming domains.
You Can Hide If You Don't Run
If you're already hacked off by telephone solicitors and junk snail mail, you can now add spam to your list of annoying semi-anonymous commerce that hunts you down and tries to make contact. In the case of telephone solicitation, in case you didn't already know, you should always tell the solicitor to "put me on your do-not-call-back list". If they call you back after that, you can legally take them to court. Wouldn't it be nice if we could do the same with spammers? Proposed legislation, such as the Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Choice Act of 1997 , may do exactly that. Other proposed legislation takes different approaches, but the net effect (no pun intended) will be regulation in one form or another.
While we wait for the legislation, which is likely to take a while, we can take every precaution to hide from the spammers by not giving away our E-mail addresses for any reason. That's the quickest way to avoid ending up on a spammers' mailing list. Unfortunately, not revealing your E-mail address can make it hard to participate openly in some Internet activities such as chat rooms--but that's the price we pay for freedom from spam. Don't put your real E-mail address in the configuration settings of your Internet software (news reader, Web browser, E-mail program, etc.) since these programs may directly or (in the case of your Web browser) indirectly reveal your E-mail address. Similarly, avoid putting your real E-mail address in USENET newsgroup postings and forms you fill out on the Web.
Hitting Back...Superficially
OK, so maybe trying to hide your E-mail address isn't such a good idea. Lots of us like to be ourselves on the Internet and not try to equate safety with anonymity. I'm one of those people, and I'm starting to get more spam in my in-box than ever before. In heavier moments, particularly when I check my E-mail and find that more than 50% of the messages have subject headers like the title of this article, I want to go medieval on these spammers. I imagine myself the fascist dictator of my domain and advocating swift, brutal action to snuff out spam. It must be crushed at all costs. When I come back to reality, I realize that forceful retaliation would likely backfire. Spammers have First Amendment speech rights, too (unfortunately). I only want to eliminate spam if I can do so without encroaching on the free speech rights of spammers and others.
So maybe I can't eliminate spam, or even put a dent in it, but I can still be an noying. There are a number of free programs available on the Internet that will help you get back at the spammers. I don't want to be the one to advocate their use since, like spam, they really contribute to burdening ISPs with bandwidth and storage loads. Nevertheless, it's fun to point them out.
A couple of interesting ones can be found on Albert Yale's Web site . The two programs, Bounce Spam Mail and Ghost Mail, are useful. Bounce Spam Mail lets you send back the spam as if it bounced. This may or may not get you off their mailing list, but it will certainly send the spam right back to the sender (assuming they put a real "reply-to" address in their mail header). Ghost mail lets you send anonymous messages that don't have any of your identification information in the header. This is a good tool if you need to let out some steam but don't want to take responsibility for your actions.
A more elaborate program for spam feedback is Spam Hater , a program that researches the origins of any spam you receive and gives you feedback options such as sending back a nasty reply with several degrees of severity.
There are, of course, more legitimate ways of dealing with spam, such as filtering software. Some free filtering software that you might want to check out are Spammer Slammer and The Spam Filter Maker for Eudora (lite and Pro 3.x). Spam Filter Maker helps you make a list of blocked domains for Eudora, while Spammer Slammer tries to intelligently filter out spam before it hits your in-box.
Lots more spam-related software can be found at Cyberpromo.org .
The Last Message
Maybe I'm all wrong about this spam stuff. Perhaps most of the people receiving spam aren't bothered by it. And maybe spammers are making lots o f money because people are interested in the products offered or the viewpoints dispensed. [disclaimer: the preceding two sentences are there to simply include that improbable viewpoint].
I'm not certain that there is a place for unsolicited commercial E-mail on the Internet, but it seems likely that it will persist, in one form or another. Thus, I urge you to join the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail to help bring an end to it -- or at least highly regulate it.

*It's three typical spam subject headers from my personal archive of spam.
**Definitions of spam vary. Most agree that its most notorious form is as unsolicited commercial bulk E-mail. Check out the newbie site for a history. Spam is also an infamous Monty Python sketch, and, off course, a canned meat product made by Hormel Corporation . The company de nies any association with spammers.
***Snail mail is U.S. mail. It's slow like a snail, compared to E-mail.

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