Word: spam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mail marketing business last year for $135 million and retired at the age of 37. Florida is home to more spammers than any other state, and Hirsch--who started his first bulk e-mail list way back in 1996--likes to take credit for helping make Boca Raton "the spam capital of the world." Hirsch filled his mailing lists with the e-mail addresses of people who had "opted in" by checking (or forgetting to deselect) one of those ubiquitous boxes on website order forms. "When people want to receive [e-mail]," he explains, "you get a much higher return...
Spoofing--the practice of faking the return address of a spam, so you won't be able to trace who sent it, or the subject line, so you will open it--just complicates things further. Today, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 66% of spam are spoofs of one sort or another. Brian Westby, a porn-website owner based in St. Louis, Mo., was a classic spoofer: the subjects for his Xrated spam included "Good evening," "What's going on?" and "Please resend the email." Westby's spam deluged a bank in Santa Barbara, Calif., and an Internet service...
Spoofed or otherwise, the spam that makes it to your In box is just the tip of the iceberg. At the four major e-mail providers--MSN (including Hotmail), Yahoo, EarthLink and AOL (which, like this magazine, is owned by AOL Time Warner)--between 40% and 70% of all incoming mail is killed upon arrival at their mail servers. But this has spawned a kind of spam arms race: the more mail is blocked, the more spammers send, in hopes that some will get through. As a result, the performance of the mail servers is starting to suffer. Two months...
Meanwhile, in Washington another group of humans is dealing with the spam threat at a rather more sedentary pace. Congress has debated e-mail-protection bills for five years without enacting anything. Antispam measures before it this session have a better chance of passing, but none is generating much enthusiasm among either consumer groups or e-mail providers. This is what Senator John McCain told TIME about the legislation expected to pass his Commerce Committee: "I'll support it, report it, vote for it, take credit for it, but will it make much difference? I don't think...
That bill, called Can-Spam, is sponsored by Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden, and more notably, it is endorsed by the Direct Marketing Association. Can-Spam would make spamming a federal offense punishable by jail time and fines of up to $1.5 million. But it would also require that complainants have actively attempted to avoid spam by placing themselves on an opt-out list. Critics say opting out could become as disruptive as deleting spam is now. If all 23 million businesses in America decided to send you just one message a year, that would give you 600 emails...