Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
About this Site
Moore’s Law defines the history of technology. It held that the number of circuits etched on a given piece of silicon could double every 18 months as far as its author, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, could see. Moore’s Law has spawned constant revolutions since then, not just in computing but in communications, in science, in a host of areas. Moore’s Law applies to radios, and to optical fiber, but there are some areas where it doesn’t apply. In this blog we’ll take a daily look at new implications of Moore’s Law in real time, as it rolls forward to create our future.
But this time, the industry insists, it's different. This time it's e-mail marketing.
Leading the charge is an outfit called Advocacy Inc., headed by Roger Alan Stone (he uses Alan so you won't confuse him with the OTHER Roger Stone). Their client list includes a large number of names and organizations from the left side of the aisle, including Tim Kaine, who won Virginia's governor's race last year.
What makes it different? Stone insists his company is using all the disciplines of the old paper direct mail business to trim lists down to names of real prospects. That means he prospects from existing lists, like those of Moveon.org, which he knows are opt-in. And he limits his mailings further through targeting, so liberals don't get e-mail about Oregon candidates if they're living in Georgia.
Had the e-mail marketing business been doing this 10 years ago today's spam problem would not have happened. But it did, and it did. As a result, any list to which people are sent e-mail without notice is considered spam by most users.
But not the government. In writing the CAN-SPAM Act the government was very careful to make itself (and the politicians who work for it) immune from the legal charge. What Stone is sending is spam-that-is-not-spam. It is legal.
But is it ethical?
The National Journal Hotlinehas a feature up on Stone today, which conflates Stone's story with those of other folks, notably Tim Yale of VButtons Inc., who are actually in different businesses. (In VButtons' case, it's embedding webcast ads in Web pages.)
What they wind up doing is merely confusing the issue.
The scam is being run by Goodmail Systems, whose home page advertises "if it's certified, it's safe." (The illustration, from the Goodmail Web site, is an animated .gif of the company's "partners.")
The claim is that this is "opt-in" only and "not spam." But the incoming lists aren't audited. This is, in fact, a pay-off to let "spam that is not spam" through the company's spam filters.
Here's the real Clue to what is going on, from the New York Times piece found on the International Herald Tribune:
The two companies also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.
Get it? They want to charge protection to spammers.
For outfits which have been part of the Internet for a decade and more, Yahoo and AOL don't know much about the Internet, do they?
I run a mailing list which may be subject to the charges, and I can tell you right away it's no sale. No operator of a free e-mail newsletter service is going to pay protection on what is legal opt-in traffic.
Everyone hates spam. But there has been no political constituency potent enough to fight the well-organized Direct Marketing Association, which has successfully defended spammers from meaningful regulation for a decade.
Now Matthew Prince, a young Chicago lawyer, thinks he has the answer. Porn. Well, anti-porn.
Using the Christian Right as his political base Prince’s company, Unspam Inc., has gotten laws passed in Utah and Michigan that could both make him rich and make most e-mail disappear. While fighting for the law in a Utah court, he has taken his show on the road to Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, trying to get identical laws passed there.
The laws create a “do not porn” registry, run by Unspam, that e-mailers must filter their messages through. Anything in an e-mail deemed “harmful to minors,” even in a link, becomes a felony. Not just porn offers, but alcohol, tobacco, gambling, firearms and illegal drugs are covered. Parents on the list get the right to sue for up to $1,000 per message (Utah) or $5,000 per message (Michigan). There are also criminal penalties, including jail time.
Prince spends money through his “base,” using Susan Zahn’s WDC Media (the same folks used by Christian broadcasters) for his PR, and emphasizing the porn angle in his releases. An Unspam press release sent out via Webwire identifies only the porn industry as fighting the new laws.
But the direct mail industry is now energized as well. WindowsSecrets editor Brian Livingston put out an article on Earthweb last year blasting Prince as essentially a patent troll. (The company has filed U.S. patent application 20040148506 to protect its registry, he says.) Prince claims he wins his registry contracts through competitive bids, but if you got the law through and patented the required technology, well, you figure it out. (I should note here that WindowsSecrets is an e-mail newsletter, so Livingston would have to filter his lists through Unspam if the law holds up in court.)
A recent Wall Street Journal story on Unspam estimates compliance costs this way:
Businesses are charged $7 for every 1,000 email addresses examined each month in Michigan, and $5 per 1,000 in Utah. Companies must have their lists examined once a month. A company with a list of 100,000 emails would pay $14,400 annually to have its list examined by both states. Unspam receives the majority of the revenue to administer the registry, and the rest goes to the state.
Livingston disputes the WSJ conclusions. He says monthly screening won’t protect e-mailers, that 85% of the money goes to the state. He then offers two illustrations of how easy it would be for the law to be abused:
A conservative activist puts her e-mail address, which is also used by her daughter, on a state registry. The listing takes 30 days to become effective. She then e-mails a health clinic for information about morning-after pills. If the clinic replies with the information, the sender is guilty of a felony.
A liberal activist registers his and his son's e-mail address. After 30 days, he e-mails a gun dealer, asking for product listings. If the dealer replies with details, he's guilty of a felony.
Ancheta is the first to be convicted of creating a "botnet," a network of infected computers hired-out to spammers and other malware authors.
Good.
Now for the big question. We've established that bots are bad. We've established that the people who create this poison deserve prison.
Now what about those who enable the crime? What about the people who bought spam generated by these botnets, or who bought ads sent by that malware? This was an economic crime, after all. It can't exist without both sides of the transaction.
Like drugs.
We don't just want to throw the pot producers in jail, the Pedro Escobars and their ilk. Isn't the point of our law enforcement to get at the "street dealers" and "users," those whose dollars enable the crime? I've seen tons and tons and tons of ads along those lines, produced by the federal government, over the last decade and more. The propaganda is accepted. We all agree.
So why not here?
Why isn't it a crime to buy the services of a spammer, or to buy the services of a botnet? Why isn't it a crime to advertise through someone's stolen bandwidth, using their stolen PC?
Spam and malware would be a lot easier to stop if those who paid for it faced hard time, too. And I don't want to hear any garbage about "distribution channels." Don't give me that nonsense that you can't police your distribution channels. Of course you can.
He starts with an analysis of the phishing business from Chris Abad of Cloudmark, which found that its vertical integration is very loose. Instead it consists of specialists in various horizontal skills -- mass e-mail, templates, chat rooms, fences - which individual gangs then put together. Then he notes this is just the way the IED market is run in Iraq.
The result is intense competition at each stage of the supply chain, and incredibly low prices for phishers and terrorists. A terrorist can get an IED to blow up an American convoy for just $50.
The bazaar for such transactions is the key. It's virtual.
Since its passage the CAN-SPAM act has done more to enable spam than any other act by anyone. It legalized specific forms of spam, it overturned stiffer state laws, and it has gone unenforced.
The primary enforcement of this "law" has come from private parties. Microsoft, which urged the act's passage, has been the most aggressive. And they're making one more attempt to make it work, suing 13 spam gangs that use malware to turn ordinary PCs into "spam zombies."
The lawsuits should make clear a dirty little secret of the spam wars. It's homegrown. Much of the spam supposedly coming from Korea, Russia or China is actually being bounced off servers there to mask its origins.
The likelihood of this being effective in stopping spam is nil. I also disagree on the need for new laws. Instead of going after spammers, go after the people who pay for spam to be sent.
A lot of spam represents fraudulent offers and those who make those offers should be prosecuted. Shaming corporations into policing their distribution channels and re-sellers would get rid of another hunk. Illegal offes should be prosecuted under fraud statutes. Attorney General Gonzalez might enjoy prosecuting porn spammers under obscenity statutes.
Shaming can work. There is little political spam for that very reason. Candidates and causes who spam lose support. When this happens to corporations, they will take the appropriate action.
Regular readers of this space may wonder where I've gone.
There's a story there.
It starts Friday evening, when a sudden lightning strike knocked me offline. Turned out that my phone service was knocked out -- not the cable, not the electrical, just the phone.
I called for help from my cell phone, and (fortunately) the phone company was nice enough to make an appointment with a serviceman for this morning, Monday.
This is a company about which DOZENS of websites have multitudes of individuals complaining of things such as spamming everyone in their personal address books, which they exposed to SMS.ac during what can only be described as a deliberately deceptive sign-up process where unsuspecting people, many of them young or speaking English as a second or third language unwittingly provide the username and password to their primary email accounts, thus making it possible for SMS.ac to scour their friends and family member's addresses and solicit them with messages that look as if they come not from SMS.ac directly but from the known individual that subscribed to the service.
That's the title of the most "popular" spam in my inbox right now, and maybe in your inbox as well.
It represents a new form of brazenness by U.S. spammers against the Net, because when you input the phone number in the message into Google you find the same message, as comment spam, attached to a host of different topics.
When you publicize a phone number like that, and get away with it, it's pretty obvious that the authorities are simply not interested in pursuing you. The CAN-SPAM act has gone from sick joke to tissue paper, a dead letter, and the entire Internet is now under attack from American spammers.
E-mail service here may experience some delays as I undergo a personal trial by spam.
In this case it's a Joe Jobber, most likely a spam gang, that has grabbed both my e-mail address and my server's IP address to illegally sell prescription drugs without prescription.
For the last few days I've been firing off myriad alerts to uce@ftc.gov, the government's address dedicated to fighting fraudulent spam, with no response.
A domain registrar called Yesnic is apparently cooperating with this spam gang. They're the registrar of record on every Joe Job in this bunch. Most of the registrations, on investigation by me, seem to be made-up, but two carry the actual name, and a legal address, fo someone in Columbia, SC. This criminal should be easy to find if someone is interested.
Meanwhile, we learned today that the most popular anti-spam technique, like the so-called CAN SPAM Act that enables spam in the U.S., is in fact becoming a spammer favorite.
The Joe Job was named for its original victim, a man named Joe Doll of Joes.Com. It means your e-mail address is forged as the "from" address for a spam e-mailing, and you get the bounces.
Sourceforge has an excellent discussion of all this, and reasons why many solutions from individuals don't work, here. The illustration is taken from that discussion. It shows how a "challenge-response" system used by an individual actually increases the cost of spam to everyone.
Today I want to describe the first part of killing this hassle for innocent users, which falls especially hard on those, like me, who have long-lived e-mail addresses and a history of writing against spam.
I don't know how, but my Mindspring address somehow landed on her Congressional e-mail list. The spam is filled with news of her efforts on behalf of Colorado's Fourth Congressional District, about 2,000 miles from my home in Atlanta.
You know what I can do about this spam? Absolutely nothing. That's because the federal CAN-SPAM Act (wonderful name, since it means you can spam all you want) states that I must opt-out of this spam, by hitting a link inside the letter.
By the time Paul Winchell died, last weekend at 82, the BBC was only able to point out that he had done the voice of Tigger for Disney.
He was so much more. Like Hedy Lamarr, who created the technology underlying WiFi, he led a double-life, as an intellectual in the fun house.
For starters he was the first TV star I remember, one of many models for what became The Simpsons' Krusty the Klown. He had a morning show with puppets, more entertaining (I thought) than Kaptain Kangaroo, with more brain and heart (I thought) than even Fred Rogers. The puppets, which he made himself, were called Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff (right).
What I didn't know at the time was he was also a polymath, with a wide range of interests and a photographic memory. One of his interests was medicine. As an entertainer he manuevered into the worlds of famous physicians, including Dr. Henry Heimlich (then Arthur Murray's prospective son-in-law), and with his help won the first U.S. patent on an artificial heart.
Taken directly from his own Web site (he was working on streaming video at the time of his death) is a list of his inventions (remember he was self-taught):
For the last few months I have had a keyword search on Newsgator covering topics of interest here, things like cellular telephony and open source. (Last call to buy the book.)
I have watched as it has gradually become worse than useless.
I'm getting nearly 500 e-mails a day on this feed, but the signal-noise ratio keeps going up. Newsgator has begun designating some of these posts as spam, but they're missing most of them, including this one.
Even some of the "editorial" hits on this list are worse than useless. Here's one. No offense to the writer but it doesn't belong in a keyword feed for cellular, despite the fact that one of the entries in this list is "I have a mobile phone."
When we count the costs of spam we usually think in terms of bandwidth, the hours spent clearing it out of our systems, and (sometimes) the cost of our anti-spam solution sets.
But there are other, uncounted costs to spam which dwarf those.
One is the loss in productivity we get from being unable to get in touch with people when we need to. On my ZDNet blog for instance I did a piece today on EFF chairman Brad Templeton (right), based on something he'd written on Dave Farber's list.
I e-mailed him as a courtesy. I had no questions. I just wanted to thank him for his wisdom and let him know I would use it.
What I wound up facing was Brad's spam filter, a double opt-in system dubbed Viking. Apparently I didn't respond quickly enough to Viking's commands, because its response to my opting-in again was to send me a second message demanding an opt-in. (All this was done with the laudable goal of proving I'm a man and not a machine.)
The bottom line. We never connected. I had a deadline, and used Brad's words. Perhaps there was no harm done.
But frequently there is harm done in these situations. I've had occasion to accidentally delete someone's note in my Mailwasher system, and then call the person in question asking for a re-send.
What if they're not in on that call? What if they sent something I needed? What if I were disagreeing with Brad in my Open Source post, or he decided after publication I was twisting his words?
The point is this sort of thing happens every day. People can't be reached in the way e-mail promised they would be, due to spam. This raises the cost of doing business for everyone, and the mistakes that result can be catastrophic -- to people, to companies, to relationships.
I'm generally all in favor of anything to fight spam. And regular readers of this space will recall how much I like my own anti-spam tool, Mailwasher from FireTrust.
But this pissed me off.
UPDATE: After posting this I learned the spam database I'm about to describe is not necessary for Mailwasher to work. My complaint here is solely regarding issues of marketing and notice. Mailwasher remains my anti-spam solution of choice.
The latest version of the product, Version 5.0 to be precise, supports a company spam datebase, called FirstAlert! This is a commendable thing, on balance.
But in order to pay for maintaining this database, FireTrust has changed its business model. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Essentially they're going to a subscription model built around FirstAlert!
I was asked to download the "upgrade" to Mailwasher, by FireTrust, roughly a week ago. I did so. It's now a $37 product but, if you want to maintain your own POP3 mailbox and a public e-mail address, it's a necessity. Upgrading was transparent, easy-peasy.
Suddenly this morning I get a pop-up, inside Mailwasher, reading "your subscription to FirstAlert has expired," with a link to renew. The link goes to a page inside the FireTrust site, and they want $9.95 for the subscription. The page doesn't indicate how long this "subscription" lasts.
Because of the way in which this was done, it can look to a consumer like a classic bait-and-switch. I bought this thing just last week and now you want MORE money?
Fortunately it's very easy for FireTrust to fix this:
Ferguson can go even further, automating his SkypeOut calling so each call takes just three seconds, barely long enough for the spammer's phone to ring. That line is continually tied-down and Ferguson's SkypeOut charges remain minimal.
The BBC reports this quite breathlessly, but there's no need to be either surprised or unduly alarmed.
There are two types of scams going on, according to Websense, which was the BBC's source for the story:
Blog addresses loaded with malware, advertised via e-mail or IM spam.
Blog addresses loaded with malware waiting to be tripped by zombie machines.
In both these cases you can substitute the words "Web site" for "blog" and pre-date the release to 1997. Free Web page companies found this problem fairly early-on in their evolution, and now those offering space to bloggers need to be aware as well.
(The great-tasting pork-shoulder-and-ham concoction from Hormel pictured to the left is still a very big deal in Alaska and Hawaii. They love the stuff.)
Well, nonsense. (I would use stronger language, but I want everyone to get the point.)
Here are some facts from the same study. Barely half of us now trust e-mail, down 11% from a year ago. Over one-fifth of us have cut down our e-mail use because of spam, just in the last year.
As for the rest...users have learned to deal. We have spam filters. I use Mailwasher. We don't get as much as before because more of it is being stopped at the server level.
That doesn't mean we like it. And it's deliberately misleading to say it is. It's like the battered wife syndrome. Why doesn't she leave the jerk? Why don't you just go offline?
It's the same question with the same answer. You find ways.
But if someone would finally arrest the batterer and throw his butt in the slammer for a good long time she'd learn to be grateful.
Good journalism stories have clear leads, a point of view, and publishers have the courage to defend the results.
There is very little good journalism going on today, which may be why the profession's reputation is shot. In today's class we have two examples of this to show you.
Exhibit A is Spectrum Wars, a long National Journal feature proudly sent to the Interesting People by its author, Drew Clark of their Technology Daily.
It's a solid, workmanlike overview of efforts to free-up spectrum going back over a decade. But it fails to put across any point of view, other than repeating that broadcasters want to keep their frequencies, including those given for HDTV.
It refuses to answer key questions:
Should frequencies be sold or made part of the commons?
What does the FBI have in common with Paris Hilton?
They're both making news this week as victims of hackers. (The image is from a conservative humor site. Some of the stuff is pretty good.)
We wrote about Paris earlier this week. (Here's a poem for the occasion. Ahem. I've seen Paris, I've seen France, girl pull on some underpants.)
Now ZDNet reports a new virus comes in the form of an e-mail claiming to be from the FBI. (Not to be undone, Ms. Hilton herself is the subject of a new e-mail virus, called Sober.K.)
As Matt Hines writes, "The mail is disguised as correspondence warning people that their Internet use has been monitored by the FBI's Internet Fraud Complaint Center and that they have 'accessed illegal Web sites.' The e-mails then direct recipients to open the virus-laden attachment to answer a series of questions."
MCI grossed an estimated $5 million/year violating the law in its home state of Virginia, by knowingly hosting sales of a Russian virus used to turn PCs into spam zombies.
The full story, by Spamhaus' Steve Linford (below) was distributed online today. It charges that MCI knowingly hosts Send-Safe.Com, which sells a spam virus that takes over innocent computers and turns them into spam-sending proxies. Linford tracked Send-Safe to a Russian, Ruslan Ibragimov. Linford estimates MCI earns $5 million/year from its work supporting spammers.
The theft of broadband-connected PCs by viruses, mainly Send Safe and another Russian-made program, Alexey Panov's Direct Mail Sender ("DMS"), is responsible for 90% of the spam coming into AOL and other major ISPs, Linford charged.
Here's the nut graph:
MCI Worldcom not only knows very well they are hosting the Send Safe spam operation, MCI's executives know send-safe.com uses the MCI network to sell and distribute the illegal Send Safe proxy hijacking bulk mailer, yet MCI has been providing service to send-safe.com for more than a year.
The final destruction of e-mail as an Internet service has begun. (This is as serious as Comic Book Guy's heart attack, right.)
Mainline spam software publishers have added a new worm to their product that not only turns PCs into spam zombies, but runs that spam through the zombies' e-mail server. This on top of an "industry" that already costs legitimate businesses $22 billion.
The result is spam that looks like it's coming from a legitimate address, and despite all the warnings most people still don't update their anti-virals so as to prevent this kind of infection.
There's a joke I make when I'm messing around with my dogs. I call them "dumber 'n dirt," even "dumber 'n dumb dirt."
I don't mean anything by it. They're good dogs. I say it affectionately, knowing they don't understand a word of it. It's our own private joke.
Well there are days when I see a news story and I don't blog it, because it's just, well, dumber than dirt. Instead I get lazy and wait for the other shoe to, inevitably, drop.
Like it did on Lycos Europe, a company whose mascot was once (back in the day, as they say) a dog.
There have been several claims on the title of "first mobile virus" during the year. Our first contestant turned out to be a copy protection feature. The second, it turned out, was harmless.
Now we have a "winner," a Russian trojan aimed at phones called Delf-HA. This claim, too, may be open to dispute. The payload itself goes to PCs, which then call Russian mobile numbers and send those phones SMS spam.
But it is becoming clear that firms like Symantec, which are readying versions of their anti-viral tools for mobiles, are no longer just playing on false fears. Whether their stuff works or not will, of course, remain open to testing.
Microsoft upped the ante on its own spam war Friday, suing nine ISPs that it said give safe haven to spammers. (The illustration is from the Canadian Law Site.)
While many in the anti-spam war will applaud this news (see that one hand clapping) it should also be noted that this is a private action filed based on the content of an ISP's network. In other words, the ISPs are being sued for what others are doing.
I mention the subject because this blog was inundated last night with comment spam. All of it came from the same IP address -- 69.50.175.146. I wish the solution we were using would simply block comments from being placed once an IP address is on a blacklist, but it take out the trash so I should not complain.
But there are other solutions that can work as well, solutions that don't exist to fight e-mail spam:
It's just that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is not willing to make every Internet user sign a Microsoft loyalty oath. Even if Caller ID worked a treat against spam (which it doesn't).
New confirmation that the U.S. remains the world spamming leader comes from Sophos. Sophos, which gets its data from spam-attracting "honeypots," said 43% of the world's spam comes from the U.S., 27% combined comes from China and Korea. (The caricature is from Sophos' French site.)
Earlier this month, readers of this blog will remember, we reported on a CipherTrust study that 86% of the spam it collects at client sites comes from U.S. addresses, although many spoof foreign addresses.
Spam's dirtiest secret is that so-called "legitimate" businesses are footing the bills. (That's CipherTrust's Paul Judge, one of the "good guys" in the anti-spam fight, at right. Read more on him here. And if you see him, buy him a beer, or whatever he wants.)
They seldom do this directly. Mostly it's through "affiliate marketing" agreements, often created by re-sellers. The legitimate companies put stuff into their channel. The re-sellers are part of the channel. If the affiliate gets busted for spam it's "Mission Impossible" -- the secretary disavows any knowledge of their actions.
This is why, not that spam has swallowed the legitimate business of e-mail marketing, it's becoming seasonal. You get sex spam in the summer, financial scams in the fall.
This could, if someone were clever, create a way in which to reduce the spam problem.
My e-mail address has been falsified or "spoofed" on so many spams and viruses over the years that when I get e-mail from myself I automatically set it to be deleted.
This is not uncommon. Anyone who has had their address for some time, especially if they're written articles against spam, faces the same problem.
A new study from CipherTrust gives new support to the theory that spam could be greatly reduced by finding, and jailing, a few hundred Americans. (Picture from USA Today.)
Gregg Keizer writes for Information Week that, rather than put up a "honeypot" aimed at attracting spam, CipherTrust measured the actual spam it intercepted for its clients.
Dmitri Alperovitch, a research engineer at CipherTrust, explained that "some spammers are actually targeting specific companies with messages that the honey pots wouldn't see."
The media still refuses to refer to this as a spam case, but it looks like the government has its ducks in a row to put spammer Scott Levine in jail for a long time.
USA Today reports that six of Levine's Snipermail employees have reached deals with the government, in exchange for their testimony.
The story below is "hard-hitting," and calls someone a nasty name.
I've written many items about spam over the years, and will continue to do so. But I admit there is a price to be paid.
For the last two days my inbox has been inundated with hundreds of copies of the same spam. Allegedly it's a message from a Katharine Juarez. Allegedly the topic is transvestite (not that there's anything wrong with that). It's like millions of other spams sent out every day, clogging the Internet's arteries, sending it toward a heart attack.
But when you get the same spam hundreds of times, or thousands of times, we have a different name for it. It's called a mailbomb.
Let's go to a headline in today's Washington Post. "Advertiser Charged in Massive Database Theft." (The illustration is from the good people at ISIPP.Com, and if you like it as much as I do, buy yourself some swag displaying it -- coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc. -- right here.)
It's followed by this priceless lede. "Federal authorities yesterday charged an online advertiser in Florida with tapping into the computer system of a large database marketer in Arkansas and stealing "vast amounts of personal information" about Americans in what they described as one of the largest network intrusions in recent memory."
Wrong! What we have is a spammer, people! (If you want to be real, real careful, write alleged spammer.) I spent five seconds Googling the name of this "company," Snipermail, at Google Groups. Take a look for yourself. Or just check the name on the indictment against news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.
You know how veteran cops shake their heads at the naivete and enthusiasm of a new cop? That's how I felt while reading this, a claim by the UN's Internatonal Telecommunications Union (ITU) that spam can be eliminated by 2007. (Image is from Siggraph.)
Here's the money quote. "If we achieve full international co-operation among governments and software companies, this plague which affects so many of us in our everyday life will be defeated in short order," said Robert Horton, Australia's top regulator.
Spam does not just hurt the spam-ee. It is also destroying the spammers, their customers, and the entire effort to turn e-mail marketing into a legitimate business.
The reason isn't in your cluttered inbox, but in a simple falsehood. The falsehood is that spam costs nothing. (The picture is of a good book on writing for direct marketing, which you may buy here.)
Everyone believes this lie. Spammers certainly believe it. Their customers believe it. So, too, do those brand names that run "e-mail marketing campaigns."
More important, so do very legitimate marketers engaged in very legitimate double opt-in e-mail marketing campaigns.
Even legendary marketers are failing to understand this Clue. Let me give you an example.
The PC causing the spam flood could easily be yours. (You can buy this neat picture of a zombie, by Wayne Renolds, from the OnlineGamesCompany.)
Viruses pushed by spammers have turned millions of home PCs into "spam zombies" which now push 80% of the sludge that is out there.
Sandvine's study cross-referenced SORBS data on IP addresses used to send spam against its own study of PCs bypassing their home mail servers.
Sandvine's most radical conclusion is that ISPs filter traffic within their networks, and stop depending on end users to maintain security. (Another option, offered by Network Associates, is "behavior blocking" software.)
Carmack was slime. But he was an individual piece of slime, a man who claimed to be running an honest business. He was like a guy with a bathtub in Chicago during the early 1920s, making gin, getting caught, and being made an example of.
Not only hasn't the CAN-SPAM act canned spam, it has resulted in an explosion of the stuff across the pond. (The image was cached by Google, but originally published in China.)
This is the message, backed by evidence, of MessageLabs, as reported by the BBC.
Some 70% of all e-mail is now spam, and it's going to be 80% in just a few months. Porn is no longer the big problem. Now it's drugs and finance scams.
Solving the problem is going to be increasingly difficult, however, because the U.S. continues to insist on legalizing "spam-that-is-not-spam."
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
Spam is back in politics.
AOL and Yahoo have begun
Everyone hates spam. But there has been no political constituency potent enough to fight the well-organized 
California spammer Jeanson James Ancheta, who turns out to be a 20-year old kid, 
John Robb, at his 
Regular readers of this space may wonder where I've gone.
SMS.Ac is hoping for a PR boost from 
That's the title of the most "popular" spam in my inbox right now, and maybe in your inbox as well.
E-mail service here may experience some delays as I undergo a personal trial by spam.
I was 
I just got my first piece of franked spam.
By the time Paul Winchell died, last weekend at 82, the BBC was only able to point out that he had done 
For the last few months I have had a keyword search on Newsgator covering topics of interest here, things like cellular telephony and open source. (Last call to 
When we count the costs of spam we usually think in terms of bandwidth, the hours spent clearing it out of our systems, and (sometimes) the cost of our anti-spam solution sets.
I'm generally all in favor of anything to fight spam. And regular readers of this space will recall how much I like my own anti-spam tool, 
A few weeks ago we were bombarded with news items claiming spam isn't all that bad, that 
Criminals have discovered blogging.
Here is the problem I have with special pleading. Anyone can do it. 
Good journalism stories have clear leads, a point of view, and publishers have the courage to defend the results. 
What does the FBI have in common with Paris Hilton?
The final destruction of e-mail as an Internet service 
There's a joke I make when I'm messing around with my dogs. I call them "dumber 'n dirt," even "dumber 'n dumb dirt."
Thanks to those lovely folks at 
The first true Trojan Horse program targeting mobile phones 
Microsoft upped the ante on its own spam war Friday, 
The war on 
You can stop arguing over Meng Wong's 
The media still 
You know how veteran cops shake their heads at the naivete and enthusiasm of a new cop? That's how I felt while reading
Big consumer ISPs are talking up 
Spam does not just hurt the spam-ee. It is also destroying the spammers, their customers, and the entire effort to turn e-mail marketing into a legitimate business.
The PC causing the spam flood could easily be yours. (You can buy this neat picture of a zombie, by Wayne Renolds, from 
I have refrained from commenting on 
Not only hasn't the CAN-SPAM act canned spam, it has resulted in an explosion of the stuff across the pond. (The image was cached by 
