Word: spamming
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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...
...Some spam victims aren't waiting for the state laws to kick in. They have become spam vigilantes. Marketer Dan Balsam in Santa Monica, Calif., has waged a one-man legal campaign against spammers who refuse to remove him from their mailing lists. No judgment has netted him more than $1,000, but Balsam isn't in it for the money. "I'm trying to raise the cost of spammers doing business," he says. Los Angeles software engineer Bill Silverstein has taken an even more creative approach. When he wanted to sue a company that refused to stop sending...
Those who send spam for a living contend that some vigilantes, in their antispam fervor, take it too far. "I have had death threats against my family," complains Robert (Bubba) Catts, a former used-car salesman and professional bull rider from Shreveport, La. Catts, who runs a 10 million--message-a-day direct-marketing business and clears up to $700,000 a year, was exposed when his address and phone number were listed, along with those of 179 other "top spammers," on the British-based website Spamhaus.org...