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Death by SpamThe e-mail you know and love is about to vanish.

By Kevin WerbachPosted Monday, Nov. 18, 2002, at 10:35 AM ET

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty One-third of the 30 billion e-mails sent worldwide each day are spam. That's 10 billion daily pitches for herbal Viagra, Nigerian scams, and genital-enlarging creams piling up in our inboxes. Neither legislation nor litigation against spammers has stemmed the tide, and they're not going to have much of an effect in the future, either. It's time to give up: Despite the best efforts of legislators, lawyers, and computer programmers, spam has won. Spam is killing e-mail.

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Or at least it's about to destroy the e-mail we're used to: the tool that lets a stranger respond to something you posted on your Web site or that lets a potential client contact you after reading an article you wrote. E-mail is pervasive because it's simple to use, remarkably flexible, and it reaches everyone. The trouble is that e-mail is too good at that third task. Because e-mail inboxes are open to anyone, longtime Internet users now receive hundreds of spams per day, making e-mail virtually unusable without countermeasures.

The most common countermeasure, server-side filtering, has serious limitations. No automated system can identify spam as well as a human can. Internet service providers certainly try: They block known spammer addresses and use algorithms to identify spam based on an e-mail's contents, subject line, or other headers. AOL and MSN both trumpet spam filtering systems like this in their latest software, and Yahoo! and Microsoft's Hotmail offer junk-mail filters for their Web-based e-mail services. But the filters are running out of gas. The spammers keep multiplying, and they keep finding clever ways to fool the systems designed to stop them. Promising newcomers such as CloudMark, which taps the collective power of e-mail recipients to identify spam, may improve things for a while. But there will always be a trade-off between catching all the spam and ensuring that every piece of legitimate e-mail gets through.

So, sophisticated Internet users are turning to a new approach. Instead of trying to block spam while allowing everything else, these users employ software that blocks everything except messages from already known, accepted senders. These systems, called "whitelists," change e-mail from an open system to a closed one.

Whitelist applications available today include MailFrontier, ChoiceMail from DigiPortal, Vanquish, and the freeware Tagged Message Delivery Agent. There's also a whitelist option built into Hotmail, known as the "exclusive" setting. Though it's hidden in the preferences menu (click "Options," then "Junk Mail Filter"), more than 10 percent of Hotmail users reportedly invoke it. Before long, expect all e-mail applications to offer this function.

Whitelists typically allow e-mail from everyone in a user's existing address book. Other, unknown senders receive an automated reply, asking them to take further action, such as explain who they are. Or senders may be asked to identify a partially obscured image of a word. A person can make out the word, but automated spammer software can't.

Whitelists are rare today, but they will become more common. The relentless growth of spam guarantees it. A filter that catches 80 percent of spam sounds great, and it is great if you get 10 spams a day. But when you get 500 a day, that same filter leaves you sorting through 100 opportunities to Make Money Fast!!!!!

Like it or not, the only way to kill spam is for an element of e-mail to die as well. There's always been something charming and casual about e-mail. The informality comes through in the style people use to write messages, but also in where they send them. You've probably sent an e-mail to someone you'd never call on the phone, approach in person, or even write a letter to. Losing this aspect of e-mail is a shame, but it's inevitable. E-mail will become more like instant messaging, with its defined "buddy lists."

E-mail's openness is doomed when faced with massive traffic and a few bad actors. The next time you try to reach out and touch someone electronically, you may need to know who that person is. Otherwise, you might be reaching out to no one.

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Kevin Werbach is an independent technology analyst and organizer of the Supernova conference.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

COMMENTS

Notes From the Fray Editor:

Ah, spam. What to do? Faced with the prospect of ending email as we know it, The Fray has come up with ways to mend it, but not end it. Join Cloudmark, change your addy, tax the net (rickotto here and Dilan Esper here both suggested a 1/10 of a cent charge per email) or Sean's proposal, tie up the sender's computer.

Remarks From The Fray:

After reading this article, the central thought I'm left with is: "well, DUH!"

Of course there's no law and order on the Internet. There never has been, probably never can be. The Web puts too much power in the hands of too many people for governmental attempts to curb or control undesirable activity to be effective.

ON THE OTHER HAND. . . the Web makes it very possible for people to indulge in a bit of self-help. What I'd like to see is a program like Cloudmark that flags Spam-servers. . . and then rallies participating subscribers in automated denial of service attacks to bring those servers to their knees!

The Web puts everyone on an equal footing, in an atmosphere of pure anarchy and chaos. And, when it comes to anarchy and chaos. . . why not share and share alike?

I, for one, am looking forward to the delicious sight of a Congressional panel laughing its ass off at the sight of a bunch of spammers begging for legislation to protect them from me!.

-- Thrasymachus

(To reply, click here.)

I had a spam problem a couple of years ago. I never played with any of the filtering devices. I just changed my e-mail address. You can reconfigure your profile or export your address book in a matter of minutes, or in less time that it takes to figure out how to use a anti-spam filter.

There is a mild inconvenience to your friends who have to change your address card within their e-mail clients. This takes less than 30 seconds.

The spammers are at a disadvantage because it's take more effort to put together a spam list than changing your e-mail addy.

-- Uberman

(To reply, click here.)

In fact there is a well-known approach to handling the spam crisis which would work very well; the primary problems with it are that it would complicate email forwarding, and would require complete rewrite of the email protocol which would not be backward-compatible with the old one.

The idea is to make spammers pay for their spamming. Not in $$$. We can't do that. But in computer time. If the spammer is going to send you an email message, make it expensive for him to do so.

Here's how it works. A person has his computer A send your computer B an email message. Computer B responds by asking computer A to first factor the following very large prime number. Or solve the following hard knapsack problem. Or whatever. Something that is (1) hard in terms of computer time and (2) scalable to be made even harder.

When computer B has solved the problem and gives computer A the correct answer, computer A then accepts the email message.

If I send you an email message, my computer churns up a second or time to do so. If I am a spammer and send 100,000 people an email message, my computer churns up 100,000 seconds in the process. That's a lot of seconds. As computer technology progresses and we get better and better computers, all we need to do is crank up the difficulty of the problem to solve

Optionally you can put me on a whitelist and I don't have to solve any riddles to send you email. This addresses the primary problem with this approach: forwarding to email lists etc. If I maintain a list of 100 people, or a server that does store-and-forward for a department, it suddenly becomes expensive for me to send mail on behalf of these people. Whitelists don't "lock out" the spammers -- they just decrease the computational payment I have to make in order to send you mail.

-- Sean

(To reply, click here.)

(11/18)

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