Spam: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?

Red Herring San Francisco Chronicle

Using my Herring pulpit to establish my credibility, I wrote a response to the column -- something to the effect that spam, while annoying, was just one of those prices we consumers had to pay to enjoy all the riches of the Internet.

Rebuttal letters rained down on me, not only from the Chronicle column's author but from others as well carrying similar vitriol -- something to the effect that I was an ill-informed, dubiously credentialed moron.

I learned two lessons from that experience. No. 1 is that you will rue the day you engaged a techie in a debate without showing up armed to the teeth with information that provides airtight support for your hypothesis.

No. 2 is that spam was indeed a big problem then and has become an enormous one now. The amount of spam flowing through Internet pipes is five times what it was less than two years ago. AOL blocks about 700 million e-mail messages a day, 100 million more than it sends. The company is working with usual archrival Microsoft to create legislation that will help thwart spam without infringing on anyone's First Amendment rights. Other similar bills have been proposed at the state and federal levels.

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Meanwhile, companies big and small have developed technologies and techniques to combat spam. The flavor of the moment is challenge-response (CR), which makes an e-mail source prove it's coming from a real person and not some shotgun-blasting spam application. To do this it requires the sender to click on a box or type something in to demonstrate there is in fact a human on the other end of the line.

It's an idea that would help the problem, but of course it would also multiply a CR-enabled network's traffic because many messages would effectively have to be sent twice. Also, a single company, Los Altos, Calif.-based Mailblocks, claims to own the rights to the technology and already is embroiled in a few legal disputes over it.

Other start-ups such as Oddpost, MailFrontier and Stata Labs have developed anti-spam technologies to help combat what has become, by some estimates, a $10 billion problem, and enterprise-level companies such as Microsoft and Sun have been incorporating anti-spam filters into each new version of their application suites for some time now.

But hoping that spam will one day disappear may just be so much wishful thinking. A Microsoft spokesperson was recently quoted as saying that with the proper combination of technology and preventive legislation, we could all but eliminate spam within two or three years.

However, consider the case of Senate Bill 5734, an anti-spam bill being debated in Washington state that would force all unsolicited e-mails to begin their subject line with "ADV:." The law exempts Internet service providers and any companies the recipient has previously done business with. Sounds fair, right? In fact, anti-spammers argue that the law actually weakens existing legislation. And who's one of the chief corporate backers of the bill? You guessed it: Microsoft.

The point is, spam is a problem that must be and is being addressed because it's costing a lot of companies a lot of money, and it could potentially cripple those whose pockets aren't deep enough to effectively combat it. But to think we can wipe it out completely is a little like thinking we can permanently ever hope to stop rush hour traffic jams. If someone does finally find the magic bullet to kill spam, the Nobel committee should create a new category to honor the accomplishment. Whoever figures out how to eliminate telemarketers goes directly to canonization.