Is spam killing e-mail?
RIVER BENDER -
November, 2007The biggest problem today with e-mail is spam. There are places where 90% of incoming messages a day are spam and spam filters can't cope. In one reported case a university's e-mail system crashed every time the filter began generating daily spam reports. Since the system couldn't handle the massive amount of data, the school was forced to keep quarantined spam for only three days, not enough time for users to pick through junk for legitimate mail. When mail goes down at your Internet service provider (ISP) it's likely to be because of an overload of spam.
Yahoo users now have to pick through a "bulk" folder for legitimate mail because their SpamGuard software is labeling it as spam. For example, when Yahoo receives a message addressed to several of it's clients, it's automatically labeled spam and thrown ino the bulk folder. Worse yet is the sender receives a bounce message that his message could not be delivered, when if fact it was.
Internet service is not like phone service that works day in and day out. It goes down more often and sometimes stays down for hours if not days. Businesses relying on e-mail really suffer when this happens. In managing a local ISP-based e-mail list like NBCUG I find it rare for a message sent to several hundred addresses to be delivered to everybody. Error messages occur when list members change their address without notifying me but they also occur displaying long lists of addresses in the same domain that mail can't be delivered to. This indicates that the ISP's mail server is either down or they decided to label list mail as spam. In one case the only way we convinced an ISP to deliver list mail to its members was to threaten to remove them from the list.
What do you do when e-mail quits working? First, try sending a message to yourself. If you can still connect to the Internet access your ISP's webmail site and see if it's working by sending a message to yourself from there. If that doesn't work access Yahoo, Hotmail or whatever webmail account you have and send mail from there notifying friends that your regular address is not working. But if access to your ISP is totally down, you need a backup way to connect to the Internet for e-mail. I use free Juno available at http://www.juno.com/. It's awfully slow but at least provides a way to send mail when all else fails.
About one in three people say the contents of their in-box are 80 percent spam. I don't have spam in my in-box and frankly wish my ISP could stop trying to control it and let clients deal with it. I know that won't happen because ISPs have to deal with spam to survive. If they processed it through their system there probably wouldn't be any server time left for clients. Why don't I have spam? Because I use MailWasher, available at www.mailwasher.net that lets me preview incoming mail at the ISP before it enters my PC. With the amount of mail sent to me I couldn't operate any other way. I don't need anybody sorting out my mail. By the way you can preview your incoming mail the same as MailWasher by accessing your ISP's webmail, but it's much slower.
Will spam ever end? In 2004, Bill Gates said that the spam problem would be solved by 2006. Well, Bill, it’s 2007 and we’re still waiting. Nobody knows what the future holds for spam, but frankly I think it will diminish in time because the profit return for spammers is getting less and less with filters and the public becoming more aggressive against spam. I think the tide has turned. It may not seem so with spam as abundant as ever but spammers are getting desperate. Some of the spam you used to see regularly is gone. I also think a technical network solution is on the way.