SPAMMING ON THE INTERNET

By Dave Wallace

RIVER BENDER - August 1998

"Spamming" - what is it? No, it's not pressed meat in a can. It's a silly word that came from a Marty Python comedy sketch. How it became a buzzword on the Internet is beyond me. Perhaps a reader can track it down using the search engines we discussed earlier. Spamming was originally defined as the cross-posting of a message on hundreds or perhaps thousands of Internet newsgroups regardless of the subject. Newsgroups, of which there are over 16,000, are discussion groups on very specific subjects, like cooking, fishing, medicine, etc. It's a sad commentary on Internet ethics when one can post a get-rich scheme, hoax or political statement on every newsgroup such that the reader has to sort out the junk from the subject being searched. More recently, with the increased usage of e-mail, spamming has come to include the sending of unsolicited e-mail. What is discouraging about this is the waste of time that it takes for one to download junk mail from the user's Internet Service Provider (ISP). But spamming is more than just annoying. It routinely overloads ISP servers. Some ISPs have already brought suits against spammers since their messages often prevent regular subscribers from accessing the Internet.

Where do the spammers get your e-mail address? One place is from the newsgroups. Software is available that can scan all messages posted and develop e-mail address lists. The lists can even be sorted to show what your interests are from the subject category of your postings. A way to foil this is to use a fake e-mail address by adding a word like "nospam" in your address, such as "cn1027nospam@coastalnet.com." The software scanning programs will not know that the address is invalid but a real human wanting to reply to you would recognize the need to remove the nospam. Another source for creating e-mail lists are from the many free lists that people subscribe to or from free information requested, such as recipes, that require your e-mail address. Many of these freebees are little more than fronts for people looking to harvest addresses to sell to spammers.

Is anything being done about the problem? Three bills (HR1748, S.771 and S.875) are currently in congressional committees but there are probably as many opponents of Government regulation of the Internet as anti-spam supporters. One bill is a takeoff from an existing law against unsolicited fax messages, suggesting that e-mail is no different than facsimile. There is a good likelihood, however, that a number of states may pass anti-spam bills before Congress acts.

One might ask why not spam the sender. If everyone sent junk mail back to the sender it wouldn't take long for spamming to become a thing of the past. The problem is that one usually cannot reply to a spamming message via e-mail because spammers have learned ways on the Internet to make their origin anonymous. Your reply is returned as "address unknown." Spammers that are selling information or products almost always depend on the buyer sending money to a P.O. box or providing a Web Page URL for ordering. For the few junk mail messages that can be replied to by e-mail, I have discovered that complaints and requests to be removed from a mailing list only results in more junk mail. I suggest not wasting time replying as it only informs the sender that you are alive and well.

For those interested, the URL http://www.jmls.edu/cyber/statutes/email/federal.html provides the status of state and federal legislation on unsolicited e-mail

Next month we'll talk about "cookies" on the Internet.