E-mailers are choking on holiday ‘spam’

Monday, Dec. 24, 2001 | 10:27 a.m.

Tips

Internet experts offer the following tips to reduce your spam intake:

Las Vegan Mike Ingram can't read his e-mail until he wades through offers of quick riches, pornographic websites and new medical miracles.

"It's just delete, delete, delete," Ingram said last week. "Porn, advertisements, scams. There's always tons of the stuff."

Ingram is just one of millions of e-mail users who find their in-boxes swamped with spam, the nickname for unsolicited communications. The volume of spam, which normally sees a holiday boom, has been growing faster than ever, Internet experts said.

"I'm getting 300 messages a day, where I used to get 150," said Ralph Wilson, an e-commerce consultant in Northern California. "I hope after Christmas it settles back down."

Analysts say that's unlikely. Spam has grown exponentially over the past 10 years and future predictions are equally startling. Jupiter Media Metrix, an Internet marketing research firm, estimates spam messages will make up 43 percent of every in-box by 2006.

Brightmail, a San Francisco company that offers blocking services and measures spam attacks, recorded 1.9 million unwanted messages in November. That's up from 583,000 just a year ago.

Despite public frustration, the soaring amount of spam isn't likely to change, Brightmail chief executive Gary Hermansen said.

"How many pieces of junk mail do you get in your regular postal box, throw away and never reply to?' Hermansen said. "Have you ever seen 'snail mail' slow down?'

Nevada tried to slow spam. Lawmakers made it illegal in 1997 to send unsolicited e-mail advertisements to residents, but even the bill's author admits the law has done little to solve the problem. The law lets Nevada residents to hire an attorney and collect $10 in damages for every unsolicited e-mail message. But the law doesn't require that telemarketers stop sending the e-mails.

"What was passed was not a forceful piece of legislation," said Sen. Bill Raggio, R-Reno, chief sponsor of the bill. "By the time it got to the floor, it had been watered down by people who wanted to protect the ability to advertise."

John Mozena, vice president of the consumer watchdog group Citizens Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, said Nevada legislators deserve credit for being the first state to even try to stem the spam tide.

"The direct marketing executives grabbed the bill in committee and rewrote it, but the original intent was good," Mozena said.

Now, as more and more people are turning to the Internet to communicate because of recent anthrax fears, e-mailers are seeing more unwanted solicitations in part because holiday shopping revenue is down along with the nation's economy, Hermansen said.

It's a cheap way to get out a message, he said, as computer programs prowl the Internet in search of e-mail addresses. Lists with millions of addresses can be bought for as little as $30.

Spammers also are becoming more aggressive and developing tricks to ensure a message is opened, Hermansen said.

"(Spam), way back all of a year ago, was a fairly infantile marketplace," Hermansen said. "Now we're seeing progressively intricate techniques." Spam can be disruptive and destructive even before it is opened by the recipient, Joseph Marcella, director of information technologies for the city of Las Vegas, said. Spam interferes with communications by jamming the bandwidth and it takes up valuable storage space on hard drives and servers, Marcella said.

Many of the unwanted e-mails also contain viruses that could do damage, Marcella said. The city, which uses filters to block habitual spam offenders, has several firewalls and virus detector programs in place and between 300 and 500 viruses are blocked each day, Marcella said.

Nevada Bell administrators monitor the mail servers for suspicious patterns of e-mails, such as large numbers of incoming messages with the same header, length and recipients. Customers can also opt to install e-mail filtering that can block messages based on content and origin.

"We take spam very seriously," said Laura Williams, spokeswoman for Nevada Bell's Internet services. "It's an industry-wide problem that every Internet provider faces."