What's Spam By Any Other Name?

WASHINGTON -- A group of e-mail experts invited by the Federal Trade Commission advanced a number of ways to deal with unsolicited commercial e-mail, including better technology, an overhaul of the way the Internet works, and new laws--but they couldn't agree on which approach would be best.

Panelists at the first day of a three-day spam conference here couldn't even agree on the definition of spam. Some antispam activists and companies declared spam is all unsolicited bulk e-mail, and some e-mail marketers said spam should be defined more narrowly. They suggest labeling it as unsolicited commercial e-mail that includes false subject lines or misleading e-mail headers.

"There wouldn't be any solicited commercial e-mail if there wasn't some way to approach these people," protested Robert Wientzen, president of the Direct Marketing Association, when other panelists suggested that spam was any unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Wientzen's comment prompted an outbreak of murmurings from other panelists and audience members, but Laura Atkins, president of the antispam SpamCon Foundation, admitted that banning all unsolicited bulk e-mail may not be in line with the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment right to free speech. "'Unsolicited and bulk' may not be the best definition for a law," she said.

Spotlight on Spam

The FTC spam hearing comes after a flurry of activity surrounding spam, from organizations and companies announcing spam research efforts, to the introduction of two bills in the U.S. Congress aimed at curbing the amount of spam. Estimates at the FTC hearing ranged from 40 percent to 75 percent of all e-mail traffic as being spam, and the FTC released a study Tuesday saying two thirds of all spam contains false information.

Clifton Royston, a systems architect for LavaNet, said the small Hawaiian ISP with about 12,000 customers paid close to $200,000 last year to fight spam.

"That's reflected in everyone's Internet bill," Royston said. "A large part of what you're paying for Internet service is because of spam."

Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York) has said he plans to introduce a series of antispam bills, including a federal no-spam registry modeled after do-not-call telemarketing registries, criminal and civil penalties for spammers who don't comply, and new antifraud measures. Schumer's legislation, like a bill offered by Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California), would require commercial e-mail to be labeled as advertising. He rejects criticism that a no-spam registry would hamper free speech, saying that commercial speech isn't as protected as political speech under the First Amendment.

"I am saying today that enough is enough," Schumer told the spam conference audience. "It's time to take back the Internet from spammers."

Quick Fixes

Participants in two panels suggested a number of solutions to the growing amount of spam in e-mail users' inboxes, although several panelists admitted their solutions may offer only temporary relief.

Rob Courtney, a policy analyst with the Center for Democracy and Technology, cited a CDT study released in mid-March that suggested e-mail harvesting programs are fairly easy to fool by spelling out "at" and "dot" in e-mail addresses on Web sites.

But Courtney admitted that spammers may eventually catch on. Others suggested a variety of more sophisticated measures, including dynamically generating e-mail addresses on Web pages in Javascript.

But William Waggoner, founder of AAW Marketing in Las Vegas, Nevada, protested that technology techniques like spam filtering are hurting legitimate e-mail marketers. When someone in the audience laughed at that comment, Waggoner fired back, "You think that's funny?"

Waggoner, who collects e-mail addresses of people who sign up for free trips and products at Web sites, also disputed claims from other panelists that the problem with spam is that sending commercial e-mail is cheap.

"If you guys saw my Internet bill every month, it would floor most people in this room," he said. "I don't know what this cheap is about."

Legislative Proposals

Besides Schumer's proposed legislation, panelists discussed a bill reintroduced in April by Senators Conrad Burns (R-Montana) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon). Their bill, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM), would allow fines of up to $10 per e-mail message to senders of unsolicited e-mail who refuse to stop.

Wientzen said he supports the CAN-SPAM legislation because it separates the good e-mail marketers from the bad ones, but marketer Thomas-Carlton Cowles, director of Empire Towers, said technology needs to solve the problem.

"I think we need to get on with it," Wientzen said in support of CAN-SPAM. "If we spend another year or two trying to come up with something which will answer all of the possibilities, let's face it, by the time the government figures out how to get a bill that deals with literally all the problems, the problems will be very different."

An April survey of 535 U.S. workers using e-mail, commissioned by e-mail filtering company SurfControl, found 86 percent would support legislation that outlaws commercial e-mail with fake headers or misleading subject lines, as the Burns-Wyden bill proposes.

But Christine Gregoire, attorney general of Washington state, questioned whether CAN-SPAM preempts more stringent state antispam laws. She suggested some of the defenses in the bill are weak, including not holding e-mailers responsible for opt-out notices if their in-boxes are full.

"Sorry, my mail box is full with their spam, and that's not a defense," Gregoire said, prompting cheers from the audience of about 350 people.

Drastic Efforts

In the end, the only way to fix the growing spam problem may be a complete overhaul of the Internet, said Gilson Terriberry, president of the Direct Contact Marketing Group, of Champaign, Illinois. Terriberry's company is an e-mail list broker and conducts e-mail and paper mail marketing campaigns for other companies. The "signal-to-noise" ratio in e-mail is becoming so weighted toward spam that most e-mail users are beginning to delete unrecognized e-mail en masse, he said.

Direct e-mail campaigns have, in the past, "leveled the playing field for small businesses," but Terriberry said sending postcards may soon become a more cost-effective way to customers because so many people ignore commercial e-mail.

"I think that's too bad," he added.

Terriberry, speaking after his panel, suggested some kind of basic change in the architecture of e-mail and e-mail servers is needed, with a less open Internet as the result. He predicted that that approach would take years, since e-mail servers are replaced only slowly.

"The Internet is designed to be an open relay system," he said. "Everything since then has been designed to patch an open system."