Fighting Spam

Fighting Spam

by Je Ae Shin

According to the emails I've received today, I can lower my mortgage rate, lose weight, meet a woman, cure my depression, and spy on my neighbors.  There were other emails, but they’re not something I can discuss in polite conversation.  Does this sound familiar to you?  If so, then you’ve already been introduced to the latest technological wonder - spam. 

Spam is loosely defined as any email message you receive that you did not ask for and do not want, though it usually refers to advertising. According to some reports, nearly half of all email traffic today is spam.  Most people claim to hate spam and the effort required to get rid of it from their mailbox.  Yet for all the complaints, spammers persist because it works.  Enough people respond to it that it can be very profitable, so if you are hoping that spam will go away on its own, don’t hold your breath.  Spam shows no signs of slowing down.  In fact, spam is growing at an alarming rate, and is turning what used to be a minor nuisance into a real problem for companies.   

Your law firm spends money for Internet and email services, and these services end up costing more than they should because of spam.  Spam clogs up email servers with sheer volume, and uses precious bandwidth (spammers can "attack" your server trying to find legitimate email addresses to send their spam), which can significantly slow down your network.  These are just some of the problems with spam, and it hasn’t even gotten to you, the end user, yet.  Once it does come into your mailbox, you have to waste your valuable company time sorting through them all.  Some of my clients have complained that they receive more than 200 spams a day! 

You may be wondering how spammers got hold of your email address in the first place.  Email lists are easy to purchase and can contain 100 million email addresses and cost little more than a hundred dollars.  For the more enterprising spam artist, the following methods can be employed: 

• collecting email addresses off newsgroups
• using "spambots" to scan web pages for email addresses
• gleaning addresses from chat sessions
• harvesting email addresses from mail servers
• randomly generating email addresses

Based on these techniques, even if you have never given out your email address to anyone at any time, you could still get your name on a spam list.  However, there are ways to reduce the likelihood of getting on those lists.  It requires some effort on your part, but the old adage "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" does apply.   

1. Do not use valid email addresses on chat groups or newsgroups.  Chats and newsgroups have tons of email addresses, so spammers target them.  AOL addresses are particularly attractive to the spammer, since AOL users tend to be relatively new to the Internet and thus more likely to respond to a spam email.

2. Never respond to spam, even to "opt-out" of being on a list.  Using the opt-out button on many spam messages simply confirms that the address is "live", thereby making it a more attractive target. 

3. Read privacy policies when entering email addresses on web sites and make sure to uncheck boxes that offer to send you information, particularly from 3^rd parties.  Make sure to read these carefully – some sites now try to trick you by making you think that unchecking the box means opt out, when in reality it means opt in for spam.

4. It can be helpful to set up a second email address for online purchasing and only give your "real" address out to people you wish to receive mail from.  Some people will setup temporary email accounts (through a free email like hotmail) for this purpose. 

Although these are ways to keep from getting on a spammer's list, it may already be too late for you.  If you are on the receiving end of a deluge of spam on a regular basis, then the preventatives won't do any good.  Something has to step in between your mailbox and the Internet to keep from receiving spam.   

Over half the states in the US have enacted laws limiting or regulating spam.  Even the US congress has made attempts to deal with the problem, though to little effect so far.  Even if these laws pass, spammers can often travel overseas and escape their reach.  At this time, it is realistically impossible to regulate and police spam to an effective degree.  There may come a day when spamming is brought under control by government, but it's going to be a long wait.  Barring a legal solution, the most talked-about solution against spam is anti-spam software.   

For such a recent problem, there are already lots of anti-spam software competing on the market.  A quick search on the web yielded over three hundred different anti-spam software available at this time.  You may have been spammed recently by a company selling anti-spam software, actually (did the irony escape those marketing guys?).  For the single user who wants to get rid of spam, there are many software choices that work with Outlook, Eudora, Outlook Express, AOL, MSN and Hotmail.  For the corporation interested in a company-wide solution, then they can go two different routes - software or service.   

The single user can purchase a license of anti-spam software from various sources.  Some are free, and others can range in price from $20 to $50, typically.  I have yet to see one that is 100% effective, but they can do a decent job at it.  Usually the software will either delete the spam immediately or move the spam into a separate folder.  One that has been in the news lately is Cloudmark's Spamnet.  When you install Spamnet, you join the "Spamnet spamfighter" community - this community is what builds the Spamnet database to filter spam.  Every time you block a piece of spam, it is reported to Spamnet.  Each spamfighter has a trust rating - if you have a history of reporting legitimate spam, then your trust rating is high and it carries more weight.  This trust system is to keep bad users from deliberately trying to sabotage the system.  Cloudmark Spamnet is subscription based ($5.95 a month), but it currently only works with Outlook (2000, 2002 and XP) - a version for Outlook Express is pending. 

If your company is interested in a company-wide anti-spam solution, then they should look at either buying a corporate anti-spam software that would be installed on the company email server, or employ an anti-spam company to filter the spam before coming into your server.  It's important to realize that not all anti-spam software and companies are alike - none of these solutions are 100%, and can generate "false positives", where legitimate email is blocked because it was identified as spam.  The way the software handles the spam can vary widely, so it's important to find out the details on it before purchasing.  If you are concerned about false positives, then you need to make sure that the software doesn’t automatically delete what it considers spam off the server.  These services for the most part tend to have good results.  As an added bonus they can usually filter for viruses at the same time, if you don't have a good antivirus solution in place already.  Pricing can vary widely for this service, but will typically start at $50 a month, for a small office.  This may seem expensive compared to buying a piece of software outright for a one-time fee, but the upside is that there is no software to configure and maintain, so your IT labor costs are nil.  

It's easy to say that spam is a nuisance and a problem.  But it's more difficult to decide when that problem needs time and money spent to resolve it.  For the home user, the solutions are relatively cheap and painless.  But for the small business, the problem is compounded by the number of users and possibly by the type of infrastructure that is in place for email.  If the spam problem is getting too much for your firm and would like help deciding how to fight it, please give us a call.