Spam: An Unholy Mess

On what is close to e-mail's 30th anniversary, spam is flowing as never before, clogging corporate e-mail servers and in-boxes with porno, get-rich schemes and miracle diets.

It's all there. Messages containing viruses, large attachments, nonlethal but nonetheless annoying executable files. All intermingled with messages from the boss, important colleagues and long-lost friends.

Much of it is totally unsolicited. But then there's other nuisance mail from acquaintances and colleagues. The joke lists, the "CYA e-mail messages sent to bosses" by employees, for example, said Pito Salas, CTO of eRoom Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

It's an unholy mess.

Ray Ozzie, chairman of Groove Networks, knows from experience. "In the past few days, of the hundreds of messages received, I've opened e-mails titled 'Proposed agenda,' 'Confidential' and 'Re: logistics for meeting.' Two of them were spam, one wasn't and one carried a Trojan horse. Can you tell which was which?"

It's all too much to bear. While most businesspeople rely on e-mail to get their jobs done, the spam surge is making their lives much more difficult.

Spam, whether it's pernicious,such as carrying a virus,or merely obnoxious, is driving more people to consider collaborative workspaces online that are private and secure, not breachable by spam and other distractions, integrators said. That could be good news for eRoom, Groove and others, integrators said.

EDS runs in excess of 20,000 seats of eRoom now, not counting eRooms hosted by A.T. Kearney, eRoom itself and clients, said Laurel McElreath, global service line director for messaging and collaboration for the huge integrator.

The idea behind virtual workspaces is to enable team members to set up online, view the most recent iterations of their project, chat and make annotations, all without traveling and shipping huge files around. An added benefit is that when the project is over, the workspace can be shut down and archived.

McElreath absolutely sees the need for more private, secure workplaces for customers. "I just worked on a proposal and with eRoom you don't have to ship e-mails around, you're not mailing huge files that clog up the network. It lets you focus. You have a more dedicated focus on the project at hand vs. distractions," she said.

Brett Zahn, president of the Design and Characterization division of ChipPac, Chandler, Ariz., said eRoom "lets you build your own little world by invitation only. There's a sense of security in there and after a while, you're uncomfortable anywhere else," he said.

Ron Wooldridge, a longtime Groove devotee, is similarly enthused about that software. "It lets you create a secure collaborative environment that is completely encrypted both on the disk and on the wire,safe from prying eyes. But it goes through firewalls," he noted.

A group of engineers can use it to look at the most up-to-date schematics and make changes without sending revisions back and forth.

Lotus, a market leader in e-mail and collaboration, is doing its bit to make e-mail itself more manageable. Among other projects, Lotus is working at making e-mail smarter about sorting and prioritizing messages. In the real world, most people quickly tell the difference between a bill, a piece of junk mail and a personal letter, said Dan Gruen, research scientist for IBM Research at Lotus, who is working on a way for the system to sort and parse incoming messages according to some rules. That way, for example, the expense account that must be approved by Friday is not lost among an undifferentiated list of incoming messages.

So far, anti-spam measures have not been wildly successful. Integrators say spammers are clever enough to quickly change techniques and domain names and thwart most software fixes. Another common complaint is that corporate mail users stop getting one or two messages they expect and realize that the anti-spam filters are thwarting them.

Federal regulators are also getting into the act. In late January, the Federal Trade Commission said it is cracking down on spam. "We're going after deceptive spam and the people who send it," said FTC Chairman Timothy Muris at the time.

But because much spam originates beyond the U.S. borders,or could,many are not optimistic about the FTC's chances of success.

Groove's Ozzie is not sure there's hope for standard e-mail. "What if, within six months, you received 10 to 100 times the number of spam messages that you currently receive daily? And what if they increasingly resembled the senders and the subjects of the e-mails you have been expecting? How would that impact your use of e-mail? There are surely no technical obstacles. I am beginning to believe that there is a strong possibility that e-mail may truly be on a path to being regarded as 'the place you get stuff from those you don't know and can't trust."

But until spam can be controlled, integrators say many customers are self-selecting their own private online "clubs" built atop instant messaging from AOL, Yahoo or Microsoft. These people are informally setting up a tier of colleagues and friends they can talk to instantly. While often not sanctioned by IT, instant messaging is becoming an increasingly important communications channel, analysts said.

"IM is a way people can bubble important stuff up to the top," said Joyce Graff, vice president and research analyst at Gartner.

Instant messaging can be incredibly efficient, she noted. "A quick question, a quick answer and you're done."

But for more robust collaboration where a team can view and annotate a shared document, more functionality is needed. "There's no doubt that there's a significant movement among large organizations toward teamware and virtual workspaces," said Matt Cain, vice president of The Meta Group.

"We anticipate within three to four years that most knowledge workers will have access not only to virtual workspaces, but Web conference services as well as instant messaging. All of this underscores the critical nature of collaborative services both internal to the organization and outside it as well."

John Wollman, senior vice president of Alliance Consulting, sees another impetus for the surging interest in collaborative applications. "We are seeing more companies interested in collaborative technologies, but I'd attribute it more to fear or hassle of flying than anything else. Groove and other technologies such as eRoom and WebEx will be the beneficiaries," he said.