Stemming Spam: Time for Some New Ideas?

But the fact that spam is more of a problem now than ever before has specifically been brought to my attention, anecdotally and editorially, in the last few weeks.

One of our newest bloggers, Ravi Agarwal (who happens to be CEO of a hosted Exchange company) posted last week about the massive spike in the volume of spam email over the past few months:

"At groupSPARK Exchange Hosting, we've noticed that our inbound spam has pretty much doubled over the last two months."

I also had the opportunity last week to speak to Scott Culver, an executive vice president at spam filtering (and hosted exchange) company AppRiver, who had plenty to say about kind of advances in technology that are enabling spammers to make sure their disruptive email becomes ever more voluminous and more deceptive.

Obviously, in the past year or two, the numbers of computers infected with software that makes them available to be used in botnets has increased the power of spammers to deliver sheer volume of messages exponentially.

Spam, even if it doesn't reach the end-user's in-box is a serious cost issue for ISPs, both on its way in an on its way out.

Companies like AppRiver and groupSPARK certainly do their in blocking spam. And they do good work. But the simple reality of the relationship between spam and anti-spam ensures that the anti-spam operators are always reacting to spam, which makes it difficult to make any headway against the source.

It seems to me that spam is enough of an epidemic, and there are enough people and organizations negatively affected by spam, that there ought to be some greater, organized offensive against some of the sources of spam.

Here's one: ignorance.

At its most basic level, spam relies on the reality that there are people out there who are willing to accept the reality that some well-meaning stranger is emailing them out of the blue to sell them something that will enhance their genitals. Or to inform them that they just won a contest that they don't remember entering. Or that banks ever email their customers asking for details. And that unsolicited email is the chosen method for communication of any of these people.

And one might assume that these people watch television - I'd bet a lot of them watch American Idol. How about a program of public service announcements? What about some government involvement? I'm sure ISPs would kick in some funding if they thought the program could really put a dent in the volume of spam (and it only stands to reason that reducing the willing audience for spam would reduce the number of people capable of making a living off sending it, and therefore the volume of it overall.)

I spoke to Scott Cutler about this a little bit, and he admitted that the folks at anti-spam companies (understandably) have little time to work out things outside of the realm of simply blocking the mail itself.

And I don't mean it as disparaging when I point out that it really isn't foremost in the interests of anti-spam companies to reduce the volume of spam. That's really the realm of people who deal in bandwidth.

And yes, I understand that spam will never go away entirely. Certain snail-mail scams that have been understood as such for decades still appear to be going strong. And the most successful spam, it appears, preys on that special cocktail of naiveté, insecurity and greed that seems to be one of humanity's greatest failings, and one of its most plentiful resources.

All I'm saying is, hey, let's try something else.

Tags: spam, anti-spam, groupspark, appriver