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Smothered by spam: more than half of all e-mail messages are now 'junk.' Recently passed legislation should bring some relief. Until then, you can take steps to keep spam from clogging your computer system and bogging down your practice.

Article Excerpt
A steady diet of spam does nothing but increase your blood pressure and weigh down your office computer system. Stopping--or slowing--the influx of unwanted commercial e-mail has been attempted through legislation, litigation, industry self-regulation, and technological solutions. But none of these approaches alone has been effective, and as yet, there is no multipronged effort to reduce spam.

"It is probably unrealistic to expect that the consensus required for such coordination can be achieved. More likely, the technical arms race between spammers and antispammers will escalate, and more and more innocent bystanders will be caught in the crossfire," wrote one law professor and information technology specialist. (1)

Spam is defined variously as unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE), unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE), or simply "junk e-mail." It accounted for 54 percent of U.S. e-mail as of September 2003, compared with 8 percent in 2001, according to San Francisco-based antispam firm Brightmail. A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) forum on spam held in May 2003 found that the costs of managing spam--including system overhead, antispam software, personnel, educational materials, and customer support--have risen 500 percent to 700 percent in the past three years.

America Online (AOL) reported that between February and April 2003, the number of spam messages it blocked and deleted tripled to 2.4 billion. A recent Newsweek article mentioned a spammer whose company sends 80 million e-mail ads a day. (2)

Spammers spam to make money. Marketers selling products or trying to drive traffic to a Web site pay spammers based on how many people buy or visit. A 2003 survey by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), which represents approximately 4,700 companies that market directly to consumers, showed that e-mail solicitations drew about 46 million Americans to buy products and services last year ($7.1 billion in sales), 11 million of them in response to an advertiser previously unknown to the purchaser. (3) The low cost of sending millions of messages, and technology that makes it easy to collect addresses and send untraceable e-mail, make spamming an attractive enterprise.

Some spamming techniques include:

Harvesting--using software that roams the Internet, grabbing e-mail addresses from Web pages, news groups, chat rooms, and other sources without the permission office Web site or its users.

Dictionary attacks--using software to randomly generate addresses using common letter combinations.

Phishing--sending e-mail to trick users into giving credit card information--for example, by luring them to Web sites that look like those of reputable companies to which they might divulge personal financial data. (4)

Spoofing--forging a return address or domain name to hide an e-mail's actual source.

Spyware--software included with another program, without the user's knowledge, that monitors his or her Internet activity and sends it to someone, usually an advertiser or online marketer; it can also gather e-mail addresses, passwords, and credit card numbers.

Open relays--servers that forward messages to e-mail addresses not listed as users by the server's owner/operator; they are programmed to accept and send e-mail on behalf of any user anywhere, even unrelated third parties. Spammers use software to scan the Internet for open relays, then route their bulk messages through that server, which conceals their identity because the spam seems to come from the server.

Spam zombies--computers that have been turned into open-relay servers by spammers implanting a virus.

Spammers may also

* split words, or add numbers or characters to words, to make them undetectable by dictionary-based scanning software (for example, V1agra)

* insert random words or characters into the subject line or message body (Bwy dis*count drvg$) to skew statistical filtering (which uses keywords to locate new spam)

* use Javascript or frames to hide format and content from dictionary scanners and statistical filters

* send HTML-based spam as a full Web page to avoid detection by content-filtering software.

The scope of the problem is astronomical: "There are roughly 24 million small businesses in the U.S. If one percent of those businesses got your e-mail address, and each of those one percent sent you just one e-mail ad a year, that would average out to 657 e-mail ads in your inbox every day," wrote John Mozena, cofounder of the Coalition...

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