Spam: Good, Bad, Or Ugly?

Junk e-mail - we all hate it. But today's aggressive spam filters are harming legitimate online firms.

Plain Words reports.

Back in May 1978, Lauren Weinstein was developing an early version of the Internet, when an email dropped into his inbox. It was the first ever spam - a pitch from Digital Equipment Corp., sent to everyone on the fledgling Internet. "People thought it was a little bit annoying, but sort of amusing," Weinstein recalls.

It's not amusing any more. These days spam attacks Weinstein's computer every two seconds. The Internet pioneer, and founder of the Privacy Forum in California, never imagined the revolutionary communications medium he had helped create would one day spawn the rapidly growing menace of junk e-mail.

"It never occurred to us that the tools we were developing for ourselves in this highly trusted environment would ever end up in the hands of the world population," he says.

Spam has become the Internet's No.1 problem. It accounts for 40 percent to 60 percent of today's email. America Online Inc. reported filtering over 1 billion spam emails in a single day. Ferris Research says that spam has cost businesses over $10 billion in hardware, software, staffing, and lost productivity.

As anger at spam increases, so have have efforts to stop it. A confusing array of industry initiatives, filtering software tools, and spam blocking companies have emerged to deal with the threat. Laws may well be passed too. The European Commission, for example, is following the lead made by the US Congress in considering anti-spam legislation and is promising to take "concrete action" by October.

The pronouncement was made by Erkki Liikanen, European Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society. He told Computer Week magazine that combating spam "has become one of the most significant issues facing the Internet today."

Exactly what form the fight will take is unclear. But it is thought that anti-spam regulations could be slipped into data protection laws due to reach the statute books in October. New directives are likely to call for increased international cooperation against the spam pandemic. Besides advocating technological methods for countering the junk email problem, they may also include suggestions for increased consumer education.

Caught in the crossfire

No one likes to see their email inboxes bombarded with ceaseless come-ons for "male anatomy" enlargement pills, Nigerian "investment" opportunities, and too-good-to-be-true mortgage re-financings. But as the war on spam hots up, innocent bystanders are being caught in the crossfire - namely the tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and online firms who have embraced email marketing as a cheap, effective way to maintain strong customer relationships without paying for more traditional, and costly, media campaigns.

Unfortunately, the rules have changed and their feet are being pulled from under them. Their legitimate messages are being blocked by a new breed of super-aggressive spam filters; their good names are turning up on anti-spam blacklists; and they are being forced to devote time, energy, and often a good deal of cash to keep their emailing efforts from damaging their businesses.

"The landscape has changed," says Al DiGuido, CEO of Bigfoot Interactive, a New York-based email marketing services provider. "This is not the same business it was a year ago."

Desired email blocked

An April study by market research firm RoperASW backs up this view. It found more than one third of email users surveyed said desired email was getting blocked by spam filters. Yahoo now blocks more than 22% of the email coming through its system. AOL blocks 18%, and ATT stops 12%, according to Assurance Systems, a digital marketing services firm. Indeed, some 15% of legitimate, permission-based email (like newsletters and ezines) is getting caught in the sweep, Assurance Systems estimates.

So how can the legitimate operator outsmart the spam filters?

You need to know exactly what words trigger anti-spam filters. That, however, is one of the jealously guarded secrets of the Internet. But savvy marketers say the following words tend to bounce emails back.

Newsletter, Internet, mortgage, offer, live, pics, protect, now, free, solution, work, news, credit.

Some online firms are giving up on email altogether. Chris Pirillo, founder of Lockergnome.com, a well-known US ezine publisher, is one. It wasn't an easy choice. Email had long been a mainstay of Pirillo's communications efforts - he even wrote a book on the subject. In the end, though, enough was enough.

"I was spending my days fighting to get off blacklists and trying to figure out why a paying subscriber never got his newsletter," he recalls. "It was one headache after another."

Pirillo is now replacing email with a new technology called Rich Site Summary or RSS. It's a new format designed for sharing headlines and other web content. Available via the Internet, RSS essentially delivers the new content of an updated web page directly to the consumer, without email and without requiring the customer to type in a new URL.

Pirillo expects half of his subscribers to take delivery of their content via this new method by the end of the year. He says the headaches have gone and adds that "Email is a polluted medium. It's dead."

End of email?

But will the spam menace really kill email as a legitimate marketing medium? Hans Peter Brondmo doesn't think so. He works for Digital Impact, an international online direct marketing business that represents 30 companies that, in turn, deliver mail on behalf of around 200,000 organisations. He is also part of the newly formed Email Service Provider Coalition, set up to help find answers to the spam problem threatening the industry.

"It is our view that you have to change the architecture, the way the Internet works by introducing authentication standards so you can have a trusted relationship between a sender and receiver," says Brondmo. "I think if you look in a mailbox in two years, spam will be more or less gone."

Plain Words Editorial
20.8.2003