The Telecommunications Research and Action Center is fighting Internet spam and they want your help to do it. Just give them your e-mail address, and they will send you more information and updates on the issues as they progress…
It doesn’t get any more ironic than that. A consumer group created to fight spam almost wound up sending unwanted spam e-mails to the very people who were fed up enough with spam to visit www.trac.org in the first place.
The group passed off the incident as a technical blunder by an inexperienced programmer, and changed the wording on their Web site before any letters could be sent out.
Not that any of us would have noticed a few more pieces of e-mail anyway.
Every single day of the week I get between 30 and 50 spam e-mails in my Hotmail Account. If I go away for a weekend, I usually have more than 100 messages to delete when I get back.
The last personal e-mail I received was on Aug. 16. Since then I estimate that I have received and deleted more than 800 unsolicited spam messages.
Since the last time I wrote about spam in the column, just six months ago, the amount of daily spam I’m personally receiving has increased by 50 per cent.
According to a recent CNN article, Hotmail subscribers receive about a billion pieces of spam. That’s about a 80 per cent of all messages sent and received, and doesn’t include billions of other pieces of junk mail that are successfully blocked by Hotmail’s servers.
On the whole it’s difficult to gauge just how big the spam phenomenon has grown. Some Web service providers have seen spam traffic double, while others have seen a fivefold increase in the past year alone.
Spammers would have us believe that they’re the victims in all of this. Unable to compete with the big corporations using conventional advertising, they’ve been reduced to trying to get in through the back door. They believe the Internet service providers who use technology to block spam have forced them to use such underhanded pitches as pretending to know you, using personalized subject lines, and dodging the software that was created to block them out.
Some spammers might actually think they’re doing the world a favour by selling printer toner cartridges 80 per cent cheaper than retailers, or offering to consolidate debts. After all, who wouldn’t want to purchase child-proofing motion detectors for their homes, buy cheap nutritional supplements, or take pills to add one to three inches to their genitalia?
My work e-mail account at Pique, has never been used to purchase a Wah pedal from eBay or a plane ticket from Travelocity and has yet to receive even one piece of spam e-mail. So be careful who you give your address to.
In addition, Pique’s own ISP is also doing a great job blocking unwanted spam, so there is something to be said for seeking out the right ISP.
Webmaster Shane Bennett of Whistler Web Internet Services says he has to personally intercept and intervene to catch hundreds of spam e-mails directed to his clients every day, on top of using the latest anti-spam software and techniques.
"It helps to be small and mobile. I can get a new piece of technology or software and install it my servers the next. I can personally check all of the suspect e-mails coming in," he said. "If any of my clients receives even one spam e-mail, then it’s a bad day for me.
"Imagine a host like Hotmail, how many servers they have and how many messages going through. They can’t move as fast, and they definitely can’t be checking every suspect e-mail that comes through."
Bennett says he has blocked thousands of addresses, and every day adds hundreds more to the list. While it’s almost impossible to get ahead of the spammers for any length of time – they have been pretty creative in eluding detection in the past – you can keep up with them as long as you’re vigilant.
It also helps to have a vague address. Spammers know all about Hotmail and Yahoo, and have programs that randomly try every name, number and combination thereof in the hopes of hitting an actual address.
In addition, the spammers are buying lists with millions of e-mail addresses from companies that have compiled user records from various Web sites. One company is selling a CD with over 200 million e-mail addresses for $149. There are programs that enable spammers to harvest e-mail addresses from servers, and companies that will handle all the spamming for you.
Spam is a popular marketing gimmick because it costs a fraction of what telemarketing or junk mail can cost – less than a penny per address.
Does spamming work?
Probably about as well as telemarketing and junk mail, and because people are still getting after-dinner calls and unsolicited mail, you have to assume that a few suckers out there are buying.
I will likely have to ditch my Hotmail account in the next few months, and I don’t know if I’m going to bother getting a new one.
I’m not alone in this. Some people are frequently changing their addresses to stay ahead of spammers, while a few others have even decided that they can do without until the spam issue can be addressed.
For more information on fighting spam, visit the following sites to get started.
http://www.whew.com/On-Line_Spam/
This site is about as comprehensive an anti-spamming site as you can find, at least for the layperson. A lot of the information is redundant for system administrator types, but for the average consumer who is befuddled by the rash of uninvited sales pitches in their Inboxes, there are lots of useful tips.
For example, they have put together a list of Prospam Providers, companies and ISP’s that support spam.
http://spam.abuse.net/
This is probably the number one anti-spam site on the net, and includes information at a high enough level for system administrators. This site is frequently referenced in the fight against spam, and helped several states in the U.S. to adopt anti-spam legislation. The laws don’t apply to out of state and out of country spammers, but it’s a start.
