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Feature Article: September 2003
Unsolicited
Commercial
E-mail
Blues
By Alice
Marshall,
Presto
Vivace,
Inc.
|
Like everyone else, I have been
annoyed by spam ever since I got
e-mail. But somewhere around the
end of last year it assumed the
proportions of a biblical plague.
And judging from the anti-spam
articles that quickly surfaced in
the technology press, I wasn’t the
only one fighting the flood.
My
fight against spam began with
simply forwarding the offending
material, with complete header, to
the Federal Trade Commission, uce@ftc.gov.
I soon began to forward it to my
Internet service provider along
with ever more desperate pleas to
do something.
Much of
the spam I received was of the
usual variety of get-rich-quick
schemes and dubious health
remedies. But there was also a
great deal of porn, sent in html
so the reader was given a graphic
preview of what was being offered.
This included pornographic
depiction of teenage girls. The
use of minors in the production of
pornography is a federal offense.
For this writer, the idea of
children trapped in such a
situation is horrific. And so I
printed out several copies of the
offending e-mail with complete
header information and sent it to
the Center for Missing and
Exploited Children. I also looked
up the domain registry and mailed
copies to the Attorney Generals in
New Jersey, Georgia and Nevada as
well as the FBI field offices in
those states. One Attorney General
wrote back to say my letter had
been forwarded to the Federal
Trade Commission, who handles
consumer matters of this kind.
Well really, it is not as if I had
patronized the site and found it
insufficiently disgusting.
I
don’t know why it isn’t possible
to prosecute a spammer for the
distribution of pornography
involving minors. Why would you
would need specific anti-spam laws
to do that? Nor do I understand
why those promoting obviously
fraudulent get-rich-quick-schemes
cannot be prosecuted under
existing anti-fraud laws. At least
one Attorney General has taken the
same view. Last January New York
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer
obtained a judgment against the
appropriately named MonsterHut for
deceptive practices because
MonsterHut told recipients that
they had opted in e-mail
solicitation and fraudulently
offering op-out services. This
caught my eye because MonsterHut
had been one of the operators
plaguing me. Spitzer also charged
Howard Carmack, the notorious
Buffalo Spammer, with identity
theft and forgery. May others
follow his excellent example!
Nothing in this writer’s research
has explained why VISA, Mastercard,
et al, tolerate spammers. Without
credit cards spamming would not be
possible. So why do these
companies traffic with such
operators? We need to make this a
customer relations issue.
One of the great champions in the fight
against spam is the Spamhaus
Project, located in London. (http://www.spamhaus.org)
They maintain a registry of known
spam operators (ROSKO). ROSKO
maintains a search engine that
allows to you identify your
spammer by their domain name. Even
though these operators are
changing identities frequently,
somehow ROSKO has traced down
which alias belongs to which
operator. It turns out that 90% of
spam comes from a group of 150
operators most of whom, according
to the Guardian, live in
the same town in Florida.
(Florida, always Florida) If we
could shut these folks down, we
could bring this plague down to
manageable proportions. Although
Virginia and some other states
have anti-spam laws, many states
do not and a federal law is
needed.
Spamhaus also maintains a Spam
Block List. This is a list of
domain names of known spam
operators that Internet service
providers, corporate network
administrators and others use to
filter e-mail before it ever gets
to your inbox. As much spam as you
receive, it would be far more
without the Spam Block List. Be
grateful for our good friends at
Spamhaus.
Reading about spam, you begin to
appreciate the tremendous work
done by anti-spam activists. When
spammers move from one site to
another, they often leave behind
file-transfer protocol logs on the
old source server. Sometimes
anti-spammers can use these to
shut down the new site before it
even gets started. By doing so
they drive up the cost of
spamming. Obviously such a victory
requires great vigilance on the
part of anti-spammers.
There are several bills before
Congress; most (including H.B.
2214 and S. 877) put the onus on
the recipient to op out of spam.
Bulk e-mailers would have to put
“advertisement” in the subject
line and give an opt out address.
Forging a return address would be
a federal offense, (this last part
could be a burden to those, such
as homosexual and lesbian
teenagers, who need anonymity).
There is also a proposal, S. 1231,
which would set up the e-mail
version of a do-not-call list.
There are some, including J.P.
Gownder of the Yankee Group, who
think we should just give up on a
legal solution. "It's
internationalized and it's
potentially completely
decentralized," he told NewsFactor.
"I think the regulatory approach
is probably not the right
approach," (er, um, isn’t car
theft internationalized?)
The European Union, Australians,
and just about everyone else, are
taking the opposite approach. They
are proposing laws that forbid
commercial e-mail unless the
recipient had requested it,
popularly known as opt-in. It is
difficult to think it is
coincidental that the country with
the most spam operators is
considering the most spam friendly
laws. Nor does this writer think
it will enhance our already
declining national prestige if we
continue to be known as the
world’s leading exporter of spam.
Of the cyber variety.
Of
course, there are technical
approaches. My e-mail has a spam
filter, which I have set to
“training.” I find it catches too
many false positives to
automatically bounce. Spam-filters
use a combination of searches in
the subject line and text to
identify offending material. But,
like my filter, they can pick up
too many false positives. The
extreme approach is the use of
White Lists, which require the
user to identify those e-mail
addresses they want to receive,
and bounce everything else. Not an
option for those of us in
marketing. There is also the
“challenge” approach which
requires the sender to respond to
a “challenge” before their e-mail
is accepted. Also not practical
for anyone in marketing.
My
hope is that we will fallow the
lead of the Europeans and
Australians. But that will only
happen if we make this both a
political and customer relations
issue. As a professional flack, I
can only say, that if your
business model requires you to rig
the political system in your
favor, you do not have a
sustainable business model.
Alice Marshall is
the owner of Presto Vivace, Inc.,
a public relations firm for
technology companies. Her web
site is
http://www.prestovivace.biz
This article was
based on information from the
following sources:
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,7496,976608,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0.33858.4719295.00.html
http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/print.php/1573271
http://news.com.com/2102-1032_3-1001513.html?tag=ni_print
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/07/29/spam_nazi/index.html
Canning Spam, Jon
Udel, Info World, July 21, 2003
http://www.intelligentx.com/newsletters/technology/articles/story_tech2_032603.cfm
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59840,00.html
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