Coping with the spam infestation

Spam does not lead to effective marketing. Rather, it damages a company brand.

Mia Papanicolaou, business development manager, eMessageX.com

The prevailing attitude is that the only good bit of spam is a blocked one, and inboxes are perpetually groaning under the weight of unsolicited marketing bumf. Service providers tweak and contort their services every which way to banish this burgeoning phenomenon, but every time someone builds a better mousetrap, the purveyors of spam cunningly craft a superior mouse.

Spam is a blanket term applied to the e-mail marketing clutter that fills our inboxes the moment our addresses are made public in any way. The phenomenon is so pervasive that even dictionary.com has updated its definition of spam from "tinned luncheon meat" to incorporate "unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail".

"As far as I`m concerned, spam is when one indiscriminately sends out direct marketing messages to any e-mail address that one can lay one`s hands on and do so on more than one occasion, without responding to 'removal from mailing list` requests," says Anna Swanepoel, owner of Gypsy Productions, a company offering e-mail marketing services.

With the average recipient of spam darting immediately for the delete button the moment a piece of text touting "special offer" or "Hi, my name is Tim, I am not a salesman, but..." arrives in their inboxes, companies sending out genuine marketing information are finding that their messages are getting drowned out.

"Spam does not lead to effective marketing," says Mia Papanicolaou, business director of eMessageX.com. "Rather, it damages a company brand, as that company is associated with unsolicited e-mail, annoying people with mail they don`t necessarily want to receive. Spam mailing also affects the companies that embark on legitimate e-mail marketing, as they are immediately associated with spam because they send out e-mails to their customers."

Papanicolaou lists the measures that should be taken to ensure the legality of marketing offerings: "Every e-mail that is sent has a working unsubscribe link, allowing recipients to remove themselves from the company`s mailing list at any time... If a company is sending out bulk e-mails to its customers for the first time, the e-mail sent clearly states why the recipient is receiving the e-mail and what information future e-mail blasts will contain."

This falls well within the South African legal requirements for e-mail marketing, as Rohan Isaacs, a director at Deneys Reitz, points out. "If I locate a spammer, here is what I could do: I could flagellate them into spammer purgatory with Section 45 of the Electronic Communications and Transaction (ETC) Act, which provides that anyone who sends unsolicited commercial e-mail must provide the consumer with the option to cancel their subscription and the source from which the spammer obtained the consumer`s personal details at the request of the consumer."

Despite the fact that the penalties for contravening these requirements are a fine or imprisonment for up to one year, some people feel these measures are not sufficiently stringent. "When the ECT Bill was tabled in Parliament last year, many consumers started dreaming of returning to their once spam-free inboxes. They believed that government intervention would be effective in heading off this nuisance," says Grant Shippey, CEO of Amorphous. "What a disappointment, then, when people realised that the bill contained a terminal flaw - it did not outlaw spam."

The South African law is no good to me if I must go outside the borders to fight spammers.

Rohan Isaacs, director, Deneys Reitz

Further disappointment is also contained within the fact that Section 49 lays out that an individual may approach the Consumer Affairs Committee with matters of non-compliance.

To date, this approach remains untested. "I am not aware of any processes following such a report," says Ryk Meiring of the Technology and New Media Law Consultancy.

But even if this process was carried out, South African laws only apply in this country anyway. "Since the prices of most of the rubbish that spammers purvey are quoted in American dollars, I assume they originate in the US or at least outside SA," Isaacs points out. "The South African law is no good to me if I must go outside the borders to fight spammers."

"I am sure that some lawyers will try to attempt this, in line with courts in foreign countries having asserted jurisdiction where there is, in accordance with current US doctrine, an active attempt to solicit trade," says Meiring. "The usefulness of such an attempt is unclear for South Africans, as a judgement here will probably be ignored by foreign defendants. Our law also prevents a judge assuming jurisdiction where the judgement will be ineffective due to an impossibility of imposing it on the defendant."

With studies showing that around a third of all e-mail messages sent are spam, it is apparent that this problem is spiralling out of control. Acting in its own interests, Microsoft has filed 15 lawsuits in the UK and the US against spammers infiltrating its Hotmail network. It has also entered into agreements with America Online, Time Warner, Yahoo and Earthlink to pool resources in an attempt to control spam.

"While Microsoft`s action is laudable, it is going to take a lot more than lawsuits by even that giant to eradicate the plague," says Isaacs. "Lawsuits cost time and money and there is always another to take the place of the one spammer who is litigated into oblivion."

Using real-time blacklists, you can prevent the mail from ever arriving at your server.

Neil Gosser, GM, 10Net

With litigation appearing to be well nigh impossible, it is becoming apparent that when it comes to spam, cure is better than prevention. Spam-blockers provide an effective antidote to spam-laden corporate inboxes.

"Gartner has said that spam will be the biggest problem facing mail administrators in the future," says Neil Gosser, GM of 10Net. "Organisations accept they are going to get spam, and are now making use of content security products to deal with the problem. We assess the effectiveness of our product against two financial measurables: increased productivity and lessened bandwidth costs."

Spam-blockers are generally installed at server level, and can be set to block viruses, file types or extensions, e-mail from certain parts of the world, phrases and terminology, spam and pornography.

Some blockers also make use of real-time blacklists that prevent servers from accepting mail from a massive database of suspect addresses. "It never even comes down the pipe," says Gosser.

While blacklists are effective up to a point, their spam-blocking abilities are not comprehensive, as a large portion of spam is laundered through an international network of unknowing servers. "Very few spammers use their own computers, but instead use open relay servers around the world," says Gosser. "The default on mail servers is open relay, and unless the administrator knows a little bit about security, this will remain."

The ever-increasing amount of unsolicited e-mail being sent to our customers on a daily basis warrants the urgent need for spam-blocking products.

Michelle Branco, B2C product and marketing manager, Tiscali

Instead, a good content management product should make use of a combination of blocking mechanisms. "These are non-intelligent devices with programmed skills," notes Gosser. "Spam filtering is like heuristic virus models that change and develop and grow based on external factors and influences. Their data signature files are updated regularly to say 'this is what spam looks like now, and this is how it`s getting around blockers`."

With certain content security blockers returning a false positive rate of less than 0.05% of valid e-mails being blocked, these appear to be an effective weapon in the arsenal against spam.

Gosser points out that content security managers are generally targeted at large corporates, with little support being afforded to the dial-up home user. This is because most products operate at server level, requiring the e-mails to have already been downloaded before they can be blocked from reaching the end-user.

"Instead, ISPs should start looking at offering anti-spam and content filtering products," he says.

"The ever-increasing amount of unsolicited e-mail being sent to our customers on a daily basis warrants the urgent need for spam-blocking products," says Michelle Branco, business-to-consumer product and marketing manager at Tiscali.

With suitable blacklists and filters in place, ISPs can find themselves blocking more than 200 000 unwanted e-mails a day.

If ISPs aren`t providing the necessary functionality to block unwanted e-mails, users can set their Outlook rules to block suspicious mails, or make use of a number of personal spam-blockers available, like Spam Sleuth and Mailbox Filter, both available for free trial download online.

But it appears that spam is here to stay, and no amount of moping and whining is going to get rid of it. Instead, companies and individuals are going to have to keep on evolving their anti-spam arsenal.