So far in this series of articles on spam, I’ve referred mostly to “junk” email – that is, the digital equivalent of the direct mailings we get in our postal “snail mail” boxes. Recent legislation has made it possible (theoretically, anyway) to request that our postal addresses be removed from direct mailing lists, but the same recourse for junk email is a long way off, if not impossible. Although both systems deliver junk that clutters up our mail and “In” boxes, the similarities end there.

Even with cheap bulk rates, sending postal direct mail to thousands or millions of people gets expensive. Paper, graphic design costs, etc. The junk email spammer has the costs of computers, message content design, and internet access. But, relative to the printed junk mailer, the spammer’s costs (and time invested) per delivered message are miniscule. This is one reason why email spam is so prevalent, and why internet service providers (ISPs) like Microsoft (MSN), America Online (AOL), and others, are trying to “take a bite out of spam”. Why? On top of everything else, it’s expensive.

ISPs are spending a lot of potential profits dealing with spam. In order to be competitive with other providers, they must allocate computer and programming resources (read DOLLARS) to identify, isolate, and store spam. As with anything, time is money. Those millions of spam emails being delivered clog up and slow down the movement of “legitimate” data around the Web. Your time is certainly valuable as well.

Because they can’t prevent spammers from spamming, the major ISPs are toying with ideas to make spamming more difficult and expensive. For example, what if spammers, like their postal junk mail counterparts, had to pay “postage” for every email they sent? Some feel that this would be a credible deterrent. Ah, but where would the spammers buy their “stamps”? You guessed it – from Microsoft and AOL. This makes sense to me, as the ISPs who are shouldering the cost should be able to get compensated for the volumes of spam gumming up their works.

Never the company to avoid a potential revenue stream, Microsoft is talking about taking the idea a step further. They have proposed charging companies a “tariff” to let their spam through the powerful spam filters on the MSN servers. Pony up the dough, and your spam won’t get treated like spam. Now, both these ideas are in their infancy, and the corporate response to spam has yet to play out.

As I mentioned last time, we do a pretty good job of spamming each other. Or, at least, contributing to the waste of time, space, and energy. Let’s look at an innocent little email and see how it becomes spam. While I’m describing this, think of a snowball rolling down a mountain hillside.

You find a slap-your-knee-funny short joke on a web site. Being the sharing sort (and, of course, having a good sense of humor), you copy the joke into an email and send it to, oh, ten of your friends that you think would also enjoy a good laugh. Not knowing the rules of email etiquette, you place the names of all recipients in the “TO” address block. Bingo! You just gave the addresses of all your friends to all your friends. You’re saying, “Big deal! It’s only a small 4 Kb (kilobyte) sized email sent to ten people”. Yes, but every avalanche begins with a single snowflake.

Next time we’ll watch the “spam ball” as it careens downward, picking up size and speed. Then, we’ll get into specific ways to keep from spamming each other.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski