Internet coalition pushing for federal law to stop electronic quick-buck artists

07/13/99

By Doug Bedell / The Dallas Morning News

Hormel Foods, of course, would prefer to call it UCE -for unsolicited commercial e-mail. But on July 22, "spam" hits the fan in Washington, D.C.

On that date, members of an Internet coalition will present bureaucrats and members of Congress with a stack of junk e-mails submitted to its Spam Recycling Center in support of the "Can Spam Act" - federal legislation designed to clean up your in box.

"It's not just a handful of Internet nuts and nerds complaining about this anymore," says Ian Oxman, president of the firm Choose Your Mail, which hosts the spam recycling center at www.spamrecycle.com. "We'll be bringing 200,000 messages sent from all over. . . . And we're finding over half of the stuff is unique, which is really kind of frightening."

For years, individuals and Internet service providers have struggled to stave off unwanted mass e-mail campaigns conducted by electronic quick-buck artists. A variety of weapons - individually installed e-mail filtering programs, a national blacklist of spammers, and lawsuits - continue to make a dent.

But now legitimate direct-marketing advertisers such as Mr. Oxman have joined forces with private groups such as the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail, or CAUCE, and the Forum for Responsible Ethical E-Mail, or FREE, to boost the effort.

"We've finally arrived at almost universal consensus that spamming is a bad thing for everybody except the fly-by-night scam peddlers and porno sites," says Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters and adviser to legislative bodies studying spam solutions.

The Recycling Center is the latest entry in a conflict over the rights of mass marketers and those of Internet users and service providers. And there are signs that it may be the most effective measure to date.

The coalition is pushing the Federal Trade Commission to help stop swindles. And its stack of collected spam will be used to publicize a bill proposed by U.S. Rep. Gary Miller, R-Calif., modeled after successful legislation he authored in his home state.

The Can Spam Act would restrict spam by allowing ISPs to set their own e-mail policies and would give them the right to sue noncomplying commercial spammers at a rate of $50 per message, up to $25,000 per day. Criminal penalties would be added for hijacking the domain names of others for mass-mailing campaigns, a tactic that has wreaked havoc on mail servers nationwide.

It comes at a time when a recent Gartner Group study of 13,000 Internet users has given reason for immense concern. The study released last month showed that almost one-fourth of users blame the flood of unwanted e-mail on their Internet service providers.

About 30 percent incorrectly attributed their spam to cookies, small text files set by Web sites on the browser's hard drive. But no matter the perceived culprit, only 44 percent of the users said they bothered to protest. And only half of those addressed their unhappiness to their ISPs.

"Most dissatisfied customers won't complain," Jeff Magill, vice president of marketing for Brightlight Technologies, says in a news release. "They just leave."

Spam's origins

The term spamcame from a skit by the comedy troupe Monty Python in which a group of Vikings sang a chorus of "Spam, spam, spam.. . .." louder and louder until it drowned out everyone else.

Spam kings - including Cyber Promotion's Sanford "Spamford" Wallace - were drawn to the Internet by the ease with which cheap computer programs can harvest e-mail addresses from Web pages, discussion boards and public news groups.

"For 200 bucks, anyone can buy bulk-mailing software," Choose Your Mail's Mr. Oxman says. "And now, it's coming from all corners of the world."

ISPs - including America Online, the world's largest - began taking persistent spammers to court, suing in civil actions for damages caused by lost clients and mail foul-ups.

"Court judgment after court judgment said, 'You can't do that when they tell you to stop,' " says Mr. Catlett of CAUCE. But the legal process was expensive and time-consuming. And many marketers just switch ISPs and keep mailing.

Mr. Wallace and others of his ilk persistently defended their actions as a logical extension of direct mail and other common marketing techniques.

"But the Internet is actually much different," says Mr. Catlett. "The stamps are free and the letters are free. The world would become inundated and unworkable if it were allowed to continue."

Some states have moved to take legislative action. Mr. Miller's California effort has drawn the most praise from anti-spam groups. It basically declares that an ISP's computer is personal property. Spammers using it for unauthorized purposes are then, essentially, electronic trespassers.

A law in Washington state followed. It primarily protects its residents from deceptive or fraudulent spam but not "truthful" junk e-mail. Under it, individual recipients of deceptive spam may file suit to recover $500 per message.

Unsolicited commercial e-mail with misleading subject lines, false return addresses or false headers is prohibited. To prevail, however, the recipient must show that the spammer knew - or had reason to know - that the recipient was a Washington resident.

Software solutions

Spam has become pervasive online. Sometimes it even carries dangerous computer viruses.

Facing a common menace, service providers - historically a distrustful lot - actually bound together. In an effort to provide a united response, many have barred mail based on a regularly updated Unix database of known spamming sites.

Using the Realtime Blackhole List developed by the Mail Abuse Prevention System (maps.vix.com/rbl/), ISPs can automatically block junk e-mailers' access to their clients. However, some mass marketers have circumvented those efforts by exploiting security holes to commandeer legitimate servers to send out millions of messages.

As a result, many legitimate addresses - including The Dallas Morning News' dallasnews.com and a large Florida ISP - have occasionally found their mail being bounced nationwide until, with some effort, keepers of the list were convinced that a hijacking had taken place.

On the Web, other efforts attempt to help individuals compile spammer lists, assist in locating Internet sources and file reports with both ISPs and keepers of blacklists.

Junkbusters (www.junkbusters.com) developed Spamoff, which builds a notice for posting on Web sites. It also will generate a strongly worded reply to send spammers demanding that they cease or pay the recipient $10 for each further mailing.

Mr. Catlett says this service dates to 1996 and may be a tad out of sync with the letter of the law.

"But it has given a stick for the individual who can't afford a lawyer," he says. "It's sufficiently intimidating that it has certainly deterred many spammers."

Nail 'em (www.minivend.com/cgi-bin/ nailem.html) is an older site that will help trace spam sources and notify a user's ISP of the problem. Spam Cop (www.spamcop.net) offers similar services for free, and Abuse Net (www.abuse.net) has developed its own version.

Experts say most ISPs have grown sensitive to spam problems and have published policies forbidding mass mailings. If you can trace the domain from which spam originates, simply forwarding the e-mail to postmaster@spamISP.com or abuse@spamISP.com may be enough to get the culprit kicked off for violating accepted use policies.

The Spam Recycling Center, Abuse Net and several other Web sites accept and forward complaints to the proper authorities and help generate information used by the ISPs to uniformly block unsolicited mailings.

Replying to spammers is often counterproductive, Mr. Oxman of Choose Your Mail warns. Asking to be removed from a spam list may only exacerbate the problem by confirming that yours is a "live" address. Many mailing list programs blanket an ISP with guesses at common e-mail user names.

On the desktop, the choices are diverse. Sam Spade, available free at www.samspade.org, is a multifunction analysis program for Windows machines that can decode a message's headers and make a fairly good guess about where it came from.

A free program for Macintosh, Spam AppleScript at www.elegantchaos.com/software/index.html, scans messages and forwards unsolicited spam to the proper authorities.

Most e-mail programs allow users to set up filters that cull spam by keywords, dumping into a Trash folder. In Netscape Communicator 4.0 and higher, go to the Message Center and select Edit, Mail Filters, New. Type in a name for the new filter, such as "XXX" or "Adult"; enter the keywords; select the action you want the filter to perform on new messages (such as move them to a particular folder); and click OK to close the dialog box.

Microsoft Explorer 4 and 5 are set up to use Outlook 97. To filter incoming mail, go to Outlook's Tools menu, select Inbox Assistant, click Add, type the criteria you want incoming messages to match and click the folder where you want the matching incoming messages sent.

More than two dozen freeware and shareware spam filters are available at various sites around the Internet. The best, experts say, are those that

filter mail before it reaches your hard drive, saving download time and disk space.

Spam Buster (www.contactplus.com) accomplishes this nicely for most e-mail accounts. This shareware offering, costing $19.95 for a registered version with enhanced functions, can block known blacklisted sites as well as those from an entire country.

Ed Trujillo, head programmer for Spam Buster's parent company, Contact Plus, says the country-blocking feature is one that has become valuable in light of a new wave of spam emanating from overseas registry sites such as Tonga in the South Pacific.

"We're seeing that the world buys," he says. "Anyone can have a product they try to sell this way."

Opting in

The Spam Recycling Center is part of a broader effort by direct marketing advertisers. In exchange for copies of your unsolicited e-mails, the site offers visitors the right to "opt in" to receive business and product offerings in chosen categories.

The opt-in tact is increasingly used on Web sites where registrations for products or services are required. And, according to Mr. Catlett and Mr. Oxman, it is gaining wide support from Net surfers.

"It's generally a wonderful thing for everybody," Mr. Catlett says. "It provides instant control if it's done right by the consumer. The wonderful thing about the Internet is that instead of the seller pushing the product to the receiver, people are searching around for stuff that interests them and asking for mail."

But opting in won't work if distrust abounds, Mr. Oxman says.

"Our biggest competition is not banner ads," Mr. Oxman says. "It's the fear that people are just going to assume any e-mail ad is spam. Our take on this is that, sure, spam is a consumer annoyance. But it's also a major threat to all e-commerce."

ANTI-SPAM RESOURCES

Here are some sites that can help you deal with junk e-mail:

JUNK E-MAIL

www.junkemail.org

An action center that includes a step-by-step form for reporting spam fraud to the Federal Trade Commission if you've been taken in by an illegitimate offer from unsolicited e-mail.

JUNKBUSTERS

www.junkbusters.com

A repository for resources that help eliminate all sorts of Web annoyances, from spam to pop-up ads.

ABUSE NET

www.abuse.net

Once you've registered, when you send a message to domain@abuse.net, the system here automatically remails your message to the best reporting addresses for that domain. For example, if you wanted to send a message to example.com, you'd send it to example.com@abuse.net.

COALITION AGAINST UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL E-MAIL

www.cauce.org

A national bodygroup devoted to cleaning up direct junk e-mail.

SPAM RECYCLING CENTER

www.chooseyourmail.com/spamindex.cfm

Send your spam to spamrecycle@ ChooseYourMail.com, and this organization of the Internet's most responsible marketers will forward it to the appropriate federal authorities. The Spam Recycling Center also makes your spam available to software companies to improve their spam filter products. In addition, users can get their e-mail addresses or entire domains eliminated from e-mail marketers' lists by entering the addresses or domains in a database.

ANTI-SPAM CAMPAIGN www.ao.net/waytosuccess/nospam.html

Learn how to report and filter spam.