Filtering Spam: Can the Bathwater be Thrown Out Without the Baby?

The proliferation of spam appears to be prompting more aggressive action by ISPs, but questions are being asked whether the countermeasures have overshot the mark. Recently, many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have begun to filter e-mail messages, including attachments, passing through their servers, in an attempt to reduce levels of unsolicited spam. (A recent report in The New York Times indicated that Hotmail alone catches about 3.2 billion unsolicited messages per day). Often this top level filtering does not quarantine the blocked messages, either in the ISP server or in separate folders available to the subscriber; instead, these filtered messages simply vanish and the sender receives no non-delivery error message. However, early indications are that this admirable effort to reduce unwanted messages is also filtering out permission based communications. In a story published by Associated Press on February 25, the Chief Technology Officer of Speedmail Inc, an e-mail software vendor, is quoted as stating that anti-spam activity has in some cases eroded the reliability of the mail system. Now a lot of mail gets filtered out. On request by a customer, some ISPs will place addresses on a white list of permitted senders whose mail is not filtered, but other ISPs will refuse to provide this tailored service. Greater knowledge of the filtering rules would help legitimate users adapt but, not surprisingly, ISPs are reluctant to reveal the specific rules they apply and, in any event, they claim that their rules are constantly changed in order to thwart countermeasures by spammers. Other innovative suggestions for curing the junk e-mail curse (raised in the article by Randall Stross in the February 13, 2005 issue of The New York Times) include charging the sender for e-mails (analogously to the invention of the penny postage stamp in the mid 19th Century) and inserting digitally encrypted senders' addresses in e-mail. At the very least, e-mail users should approach their in-house tech staff to learn more about their individual system attributes and should contact their ISP regarding its filtering policy. (In related news, the editing and distribution of a previous edition of E-TIPSâ„¢ was temporarily delayed by our own ISP due to references in one article to certain medications which feature prominently in a lot of spam. It took several phone calls and e-mail messages from our technical staff before the ISP would even admit that they were filtering customer e-mail.) For the Associated Press report, visit: http://makeashorterlink.com/?T100121AA. Summary by: The Editor