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The battle against spam has drawn a variety of creative weapons, ranging from software filters to litigation. Now anti-spammers are pulling out the big guns: poetry and puppies.

One of the newest is from Habeas.com, which in August unveiled a scheme to separate legitimate e-mail from spam by inserting nine lines of copyrighted text--including three lines of haiku--into the header of each message. Around the same time, MailFrontier released the beta of a new filtering program that, among other things, uses pictures of adorable pooches to verify that mail was sent by a person, not a machine.

Poetic Justice

The premise behind the Sender Warranted Email scheme is simple, says Anne Mitchell, chief executive officer of Habeas and former legal counsel for the Mail Abuse Prevention System. Instead of trying to identify the spam in your in-box, Habeas wants to flag the ones that are legit.

"We're coming at this problem from the opposite side," says Mitchell. "We want to let you get the mail you want, not the spam you don't want."

To use Habeas SWE, users must sign a licensing agreement stating they will not send unsolicited commercial e-mail. Then they must configure their e-mail clients or mail servers to insert the nine lines of copyrighted text into each outgoing message. They may also configure their software to identify incoming mail containing the Habeas content, so those messages stand out.

Mitchell says she set up her own Pegasus mail client to identify incoming Habeas mail and turn the subject line hot pink. "If I only have five minutes between meetings, I can look at my in-box and instantly know which messages are not a waste of my time," she says.

If spammers try to subvert this process--by, say, adding the header lines to mail without signing the license agreement--they will run afoul of copyright and trademark laws, which carry much stiffer penalties than existing anti-spam statutes.

"The beauty of basing our model on copyright law is that it's well-established, easy to prove, and has huge statutory judgments," Mitchell adds.

Yet her firm hopes to turn a profit not by suing spammers, but by charging legitimate electronic marketers fees to use the Habeas content. Fees are up to a penny per e-mail message, with a cap of $3000 per month. (The service is available free to individuals and ISPs, and costs $200 annually for enterprises.) Marketers who sign the license agreement must agree to strict rules, such as obtaining users' permission before sending them mail.

Biting Back at Spam

MailFrontier takes a somewhat more traditional tack to battle spam. Its filtering software, called Matador, installs directly into Microsoft Outlook and uses sophisticated algorithms to detect potential spam. (A version that works with Outlook Express is scheduled for release this fall).

Because spammers continually find new techniques to thwart filters, MailFrontier plans to update its software using input from Matador users, says company cofounder Brian Wilson. The software identifies unique characteristics of each piece of spam--what Wilson calls a "thumbprint"--and sends a copy of the thumbprint to MailFrontier, which uses that information to issue new algorithms.

Matador is unique in how it verifies that a sender is real, not a mailing agent. When the utility detects a suspicious message, it can challenge the message by sending a question back to the message's return address. For example, one challenge shows a litter of newborn shar-peis and asks how many puppies are pictured. Other challenges feature pictures of kittens and dolphins, and a text-only question for business correspondence.

Because spam is almost always sent by machines--and usually from bogus addresses--those challenges will go unanswered, so the spam will never hit your in-box.

Wilson estimates that the Matador client software will sell for between $20 and $30 when the final version is released. An enterprise edition is scheduled for release in October.

In Praise of Geek Haiku

Whether either scheme will ultimately succeed in slowing the growth of spam is uncertain at best. But with spam attacks up more than 500 percent in the last year, according to filtering software vendor Brightmail, users seem willing to try just about anything.

Habeas' Anne Mitchell says her firm's scheme has received a warm reception from the online community, noting that it has inspired members of Slashdot to submit more than 700 of their own anti-spam haiku.

Naturally, the temptation is irresistible:

Haiku and hounds may Take a bite out of spammers And maybe your pants.

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