Message To Spammers: Stay Out Of In-Boxes

Even as Mike Stevens makes plans to deploy the latest version of ActiveState Corp.'s anti-spam software, due this week, he's not confident the tools will free his company from unwanted messages anytime soon. The systems administrator for Macrovision Corp., a maker of copy-protection and license-management software, says roughly 45% of the 10,000 messages that enter Macrovision's network each day are identified as spam, and the volume of spam getting through the filter has grown over the past few weeks. "The spammers are certainly catching on to what the anti-spam vendors are doing," he says. "It's going to be an ongoing battle."

Lawmakers are mustering their forces to combat spam, though it's unclear whether those efforts will be any more effective than anti-spam technology. Last week, Virginia, which has prohibited unsolicited E-mail since 1999, imposed harsher penalties for sending deceptive spam to or from the state. The legislation categorized as a felony the delivery of the worst forms of unsolicited E-mail--messages containing offensive content, such as pornography, or using deceptive measures to bypass filters and entice users to open them. Penalties carry up to six years in prison and fines. The law also permits seizure of profits gained through spamming activities.

A day earlier, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he plans to introduce legislation that would impose stiff penalties, including fines and jail time, on spammers and require that mass E-mail ads be labeled "ADV" in subject lines. The law would provide $75 million to the Federal Trade Commission to set up a national registry of E-mail addresses of users who sign up for a no-spam list. E-mail marketers would be barred from sending unwanted messages to those addresses. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said she will introduce legislation to create a bounty for identifying spammers derived from fines collected by the FTC. The FTC last week held a public forum in Washington, D.C., to discuss legislative action.

Ferris Research estimates spam will cost U.S. businesses more than $10 billion this year in productivity losses and in software and IT-staff time to combat it. Last week rivals America Online, Microsoft, and Yahoo formed an alliance to develop technology to better identify the origin of E-mail, restrict E-mail that hides or changes the sender's identity, and eliminate the ability to create fraudulent E-mail accounts in bulk. The alliance is working with legislators and Internet service providers to coordinate spam-fighting resources.

Twenty-nine states have spam legislation on the books, but there have been only 48 spam-related convictions nationwide, says Steve Jillings, CEO of anti-spam vendor FrontBridge Technologies Inc. At least one industry executive fears anti-spam legislation may lead to a backlash. Sandy Whiteman, chief technologist of E-mail systems integrator Cypress Integrated Systems, foresees alliances springing up between spammers and hackers who want to take revenge on legislators, businesses, and anti-spam vendors. "It's surprising this connection hasn't happened yet," Whiteman says. "The number of servers owned and controlled by spammers is overwhelming. We're lucky they're only using them for commercial purposes."

Photo by Tina Fineberg/AP