Spam Slayer: Spam Fighters Battered
In court and online, antispam efforts are taking a beating.
Daniel Tynan, special to PCWorld.com
In this new weekly online column chronicling the spam wars, we'll report on the latest battles, whether on the Net or in the courtroom. We'll also offer counsel to the afflicted, so send your spam gripes and questions to spamwatch@pcworld.com. Our inaugural writer is frequent spam-beat reporter Daniel Tynan; later this month Tom Spring will take the column's helm. As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome. Return to the SpamWatch page for more articles.
Anyone with an e-mail address is familiar with the war on junk e-mail, though few people enjoy fighting it. According to a recent online survey, most Americans would rather clean their toilets than de-spam their in-boxes. But you may not know that a bigger battle is brewing between the spam cartel and antispammers--and that things are really starting to get nasty.
This particular conflict centers on so-called blackhole lists or blocklists, which are databases of Internet addresses allegedly used to send spam. About 400 such lists exist, mostly maintained by individuals or small groups of volunteers. When e-mail comes into an ISP or corporation that uses such lists, the network mail server checks each message's IP address against the database and rejects any message whose address results in a match.
Spammers hate these lists with a passion bordering on pathology (as do many legit e-marketers, but that's another story).
For several weeks, the most active blocklists have been under continuous denial-of-service attacks that have succeeded in taking some of them offline. List operators have no doubt that spammers are behind these attacks; many believe they stem from a variant of the Sobig virus that spread last spring. This worm allows an individual to take control of an infected PC and use it to send unsolicited messages or initiate DoS attacks.
But not all spam-war battles are waged underground. In April, an anonymous group of bulk mailers calling themselves EMarketersAmerica.org filed suit against nine leading antispam activists--including, interestingly enough, nearly all the blocklist operators currently under attack. The bulk mailers claimed then that the antispammers were interfering with the bulkers' business operations.
The antispammers countered by hiring Atlanta attorney Pete Wellborn, who has won several high-profile spam suits for EarthLink. Recently, in late August, Wellborn filed what he terms "the mother of all dismissal motions," a scathing document calling the EMarketersAmerica suit "a publicity stunt designed to deter the Defendants ... from engaging in the ongoing war against the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mail." Wellborn is asking EMarketersAmerica to pay the defendants' legal costs, which he estimates to be "at least $50,000."
EMarketersAmerica attorney Mark Felstein has already cried uncle, offering his own dismissal motion. He says he hasn't read Wellborn's motion, and in any case no longer has a client: Felstein says he will be dissolving EMarketersAmerica "at the next opportunity."
Looks like the antispammers have won this skirmish. But the war goes on.
Spam Q&A
Question: I recently purchased McAfee SpamKiller only to discover that it doesn't support America Online. What can I do to get rid of the junk in AOL?
--Milton L.
Answer: AOL blocks a fair amount of spam on its own--up to 2 billion messages a day, by its own estimates--but AOL's spam filters are mediocre at best. Unfortunately, few stand-alone programs work with the world's largest online service.
Your best bet is any of the Web-based services, such as Spam Cop or Mailblocks, that download mail from AOL, filter it, and let you read it on their sites. Spam Cop costs $30 yearly; Mailblocks starts around $10 per annum. But remember: If you have one of AOL's limited-usage plans, these sites will eat up a few minutes of your monthly allotment every time they check your in-box.
Q: Whom can we contact to make our views known on spam legislation and get updates on what's happening in Congress and in state legislatures?
--Stephen M.
A: The best source for information on spam legislation in the United States is David Sorkin's Spam Laws site. You'll find summaries of current state law as well as pending federal legislation (Congress has yet to enact any legislation regarding spam).
Other excellent sources for news on spam (besides Spam Watch, of course) are Spam.abuse.net and the Pete Moss spam blog. Want to write to Congress? You can get contact information for your representative or senator.
Q: Why don't e-mail programs give us the option of allowing incoming mail only from senders we have specified (such as only those listed in our address book)?
--Paul D.
A: While the major e-mail clients don't have this function built in, the most popular ISPs do. Both America Online and Microsoft's MSN let you limit e-mail to people already in your address book. The problem with this scheme is that you may not get e-mail you might actually want--say, a message from an old high school friend, or correspondence from a potential client.
A better approach is one taken by spam filters that employ so-called challenge/response systems, such as Qurb and EarthLink's Spaminator. When e-mail comes from someone not on your list of approved senders, the software sends out a "challenge"--usually an e-mail containing an easily solved puzzle--for the sender to complete. If senders pass the challenge, their mail gets through and they're added to your list. Since most spam is sent by machines, they don't pass the challenge and the junk gets blocked.
Have a spam-related question or problem? Send them to spamwatch@pcworld.com.
Contributing Editor Daniel Tynan is pinch-hitting for regular Spam Watch columnist Tom Spring, who is currently on paternity leave.
