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MessageLabs' decision to offer all its customers a spam-blocking service level agreement is a sign that the e-mail security market is approaching maturity, according to analysts.
The company said on Wednesday it would offer an SLA to its customers guaranteeing that 95 percent of their spam would be blocked, with a false positive rate of less than 0.0004 percent.
MessageLabs provides an outsourced e-mail security service that filters all incoming messages before they reach the customer's internal network. The company claims it is the first to offer an SLA that guarantees to capture the majority of spam with a minute false positive rate.
Analysts said that MessageLabs' confidence in its products was a sign that the anti-spam market was finally getting on top of the problem.
Megan Dahlgren, senior analyst for software at International Data Corp (IDC), said although there is a greater volume of spam being sent, the technology used by anti-spam companies is now able to confidently identify unwanted e-mails.
"Catching spam is about identifying a certain class of e-mail. There are lots of different types of fish in the sea but if there was a huge growth of salmon, you would know the right type of net to catch the salmon. Similarly, spam is highly identifiable and easy to catch. It wouldn't be so easy if all the spam out there was different," said Dahlgren.
James Turner, security analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said companies had come to see e-mail as a commodity and so were more likely to pass over responsibility for separating legitimate e-mail messages from spam to a third party.
"For many companies e-mail is a business tool and very much a commodity service -- they are used to it. This is helping streamline that and it is a trend we are going to see a lot more of -- third parties stepping in and helping clean up the Internet. MessageLabs is taking responsibility away from the end user," said Turner.
IDC's Dahlgren said MessageLabs' SLA was more "a confidence and marketing thing than anything else. If you compare product for product they are pretty similar in the amount of spam they collect.
Joe Lombardo, marketing manager for MessageLabs Asia Pacific, said the company had always claimed to provide high levels of spam capture with a low false positive rate, but, following some independent testing last year, the company believed it was in a position to guarantee those levels.
"We have always been above a 90 percent capture rate but what we wanted to do was have an independent verification of it,' said Lombardo, referring to a test carried out by The VeriTest Anti-Spam Benchmark Service in November 2004.
"The testing coincided with us being able to go to market and say this is a level we can now guarantee," said Lombardo, who emphasised that MessageLabs already guaranteed its customers would not be infected by a virus, "We guarantee that firms will not be affected by any virus -- new or existing -- if they are using the MessageLabs service. This is just the next step."
Lombardo said that the spam SLA would apply to both existing and new customers and would not be part of a premium service. However, he was unable to state the amount of compensation that will be offered should the service fall below the agreed level.
"[Compensation] is on an individual basis but there is a credit that is offered on the service. We bill on a monthly basis so dependent on the level service degradation we would compensate on an individual basis," said Lombardo.

BigPond has moved to boost its anti-spam systems as the Internet service provider revealed its existing network filters were rejecting six million spam or virus-infected e-mails every day. Managing director Justin Milne said in an e-mail to BigPond users last night he had given the go-ahead "to further boost" the filters as spam continued to be a "common problem" for Internet users. A BigPond spokesperson said the upgrade would increase filtering capacity by a further 15 percent. Spam zombies would be targeted and additional content-based spam classifications implemented under the project. Milne said all mail entering or leaving the BigPond network had been filtered since April last year. The managing director also used the e-mail to highlight customer growth and the need to employ sturdy systems to cope with BigPond's data traffic volumes. The provider -- Australia's largest -- is moving about 1.3 trillion kilobytes each month across its network and more than 20 million e-mails every day. Milne added the provider was about to sign up its two-millionth Internet customer "so you can see why we need robust systems to keep things ticking over!" It is believed the carrier is around two weeks away from reaching that milestone. He said improvements in the wings included the already-mooted billing system upgrade which would allow customers to combine all their Internet charges with their Telstra single bill. He said the current pilot was "working well" and full rollout was expected later this year. A new BPay facility for BigPond users was attracting extensive use. Milne also said BigPond had put "a lot of time and effort" into upgrading its cable network through adding capacity and backups, removing old infrastructure and standardising its wired and wireless modems. The provider has also implemented additional self-serve options to its My BigPond section of BigPond.com.

Internet Initiative Japan Inc. (IIJ, NASDAQ: IIJI), one of Japan's leading Internet access and comprehensive network solutions providers, today announced that it will provide Toshiba Corporation (Toshiba) with an anti-spam solution.
The anti-spam solution being provided to Toshiba consists of two components: IIJ Edge Filter and IIJ Spam Mail Filter. The IIJ Edge Filter identifies and restricts mass spam mail that is sent to a single server in a short period of time, as well as mail that clearly contains suspicious content. The IIJ Spam Mail Filter determines a spam rating for all incoming mail messages and filters them on that basis. IIJ Edge Filter was implemented in December of last year, while IIJ Spam Mail Filter will be implemented in June of this year.
Every year, mountains of spam are sent to users without their consent, and every year the perpetrators devise more devious and vicious methods to send even more. The problem has become so critical that more than 70% of the mail sent in the U.S. is said to be spam. The problem is becoming more serious in Japan as well, and for businesses in particular, responding to the growing flood of spam mail is a drain on budgets and systems, not to mention a drag on productivity for entire companies.
Toshiba maintains tens of thousands of mail accounts on it's Group network, which makes resolving the spam mail problem a priority. IIJ has worked with Toshiba in the past when it decided to implement IIJ's Web Gateway Service to provide securely managed Web access. With IIJ's advanced Internet technology, the IIJ Web Gateway's record of high performance, and IIJ's pioneering efforts in anti-spam solutions, it was natural choice for Toshiba to enlist IIJ's help again on this project.
After implementing IIJ Edge Filter, Toshiba saw a 30% drop in mail traffic, and this performance is expected to increase once the IIJ Spam Mail Filter is brought on-line.
The IIJ Anti-spam Mail Solution
The IIJ Anti-spam Mail Solution consists of the components described below, and these components create a multi-tiered filtering structure that achieves better filtering rates on spam mail with far fewer false positives, and removes the need to waste money on additional equipment.
IIJ Edge Filter
IIJ's proprietary anti-spam solution uses a three-pronged approach to stop large mass mail transmissions before they reach a customer's system: (1) Mail volume control, which checks the number of messages received in a certain unit of time to determine when large volume mail transmissions are occurring, (2) Access control, which uses IP addresses and sender/receiver information to interrupt or restrict mail from specific sources, and (3) File extension filtering, which interrupts or restricts messages with file attachments that have certain file extensions. This service prevents damage that is caused by large volumes of mail hitting a user's system at once, and improves system availability.
Future developments will make the system compatible with the up and coming sender authentication technology for fighting spam.
IIJ Spam Mail Filter
U.S.-based MX Logic's filtering engine provides the spam filtering features that determine the spam rating of all incoming messages. The spam level is then used to filter out spam. Messages with a high spam rating are put into quarantine automatically on a remote folder where they can be deleted en masse, thus greatly reducing the load on the customer's servers.
E-mail has become an indispensable tool in our daily lives, and IIJ will continue working to develop services that make it easier to use.
About IIJ
Founded in 1992, Internet Initiative Japan Inc. (IIJ, NASDAQ: IIJI) is one of Japan's leading Internet-access and comprehensive network solutions providers. The company has built one of the largest Internet backbone networks in Japan, and between Japan and the United States. IIJ and its group of companies provide total network solutions that mainly cater to high-end corporate customers. The company's services include high-quality systems integration and security services, Internet access, hosting/housing, and content design.
The statements within this release contain forward-looking statements about our future plans that involve risk and uncertainty. These statements may differ materially from actual future events or results. Readers are referred to the documents furnished by Internet Initiative Japan Inc. with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on Forms 20-F and 6-K, which identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements.

Things looked pretty gloomy for e-mail marketing when lawmakers, regulators and Internet service providers took steps several years ago to ban the most abusive practices of spam marketers. Online merchants worried that the anti-spam measures would limit the effectiveness of their e-mail marketing campaigns. Indeed, many retailers found their messages diverted into junk mail boxes simply because they used graphics or coding that triggered a red flag.
Over the same time period, the volume of e-mail messages exploded. EMarketer Inc. estimates e-mail volume in the U.S. will hit 2.1 trillion this year, up from 1.2 trillion in 2001. That increases the chances that customers weary of e-mail inboxes gorged with messages will send the retailer’s e-mail message straight to the trash bin.
More sophistication
But a funny thing happened on the way to e-mail marketing’s funeral: E-mail marketing refused to die. And today, with retailers adopting more sophisticated approaches to e-mail marketing—and possessing a better understanding of how they should use e-mail—e-mail has become a valuable weapon in marketers’ arsenal.
“If you’re in the e-commerce business, you have two things to really drive your sales—search, which is the ability to get somebody to come to your web site for the first time, and e-mail, which gets them to repeat,” says Arthur Sweetser, vice president of professional services and marketing for e-mail marketing company e-Dialog.
Getting to this point in understanding how to use e-mail wasn’t easy. In fact, it required a change of mindset by marketers—one that required sending what the customer wanted and not what the retailer wanted. Today at American Eagle Outfitters, for instance, e-mail messages are tailored to appeal to different customer groups, says David L. Brumback, director of operations at AE Direct. “It’s not about what I want to talk about so much as it is about what the customer wants to hear,” he says. “That requires understanding the data I have about that customer to make what I say more relevant.”
The industry still faces plenty of obstacles, but e-mail still can be an effective marketing tool, even in the post-CAN-Spam world. A recent Jupiter Research survey found that 10% of 2,229 online consumers reported they opened a promotional e-mail and made a purchase online immediately. Additionally, 17% said they opened a promotional e-mail and later made an online purchase as a result.
Everybody’s concerned
But the resistance hasn’t evaporated. The Jupiter Research survey also found that 73% of consumers have deleted promotional e-mails without opening them and 42% unsubscribed to e-mail newsletters in the past 12 months.
In today’s e-mail environment, to run a successful e-mail marketing campaign, online merchants need to build relationships and trust with their customers, experts say. “Everybody is concerned about e-mail—whether or not it’s going to survive because of spam, because of filters, because of all that,” says Reid Carr, president of Red Door Interactive. “But it comes down to basic principles, which is a matter of getting your target to trust you.”
To build trust, merchants need to gather as much information as possible about customers so they can personalize messages. “It’s all about relevancy and how we develop relevancy,” Sweetser says.
That’s the approach that American Eagle takes as its e-mail strategy has become more sophisticated, Brumback says. “When we started doing this five years ago, the vast majority buying online were male,” Brumback says. “Today, the vast majority is female. All of that information that comes with direct marketing changes how you talk to people.”
In fact, appealing specifically to what the customer wants is a key to e-mail marketing success, marketers say. “E-mail is about learning, it’s not a single event,” says David Baker, vice president of e-mail marketing and analytic solutions for agency.com. “The value of e-mail is learning the response patterns of your customers.”
Following the path
Tracking the path of e-mail messages can give Internet retailers deep insight into their customers, Baker says. That information can include which ISP the consumer uses, which links the consumer selected, and which products the customer bought, he says.
One of the best ways to gain access to that customer information is through an opt-in form, in which a consumer signs up to receive information from the merchant. Some e-mail marketers recommend double-opt-ins, a process in which a consumer registers at a retailer’s site and then responds to an e-mail from the retailer asking the customer to verify the opt-in.
“Numbers go up and down in terms of whether people open your e-mail, whether they’re going to act on anything that you send to them, so one factor in all of this is making sure they really want to receive your e-mail,” Carr says. “Companies that do double opt-ins have higher open rates, higher click-through rates and higher deliverability.”
What’s more, if retailers only offer opt-out marketing, they’ll run into problems with spam filters and other anti-spam measures, says Ziv Yaar, director of strategies for Molecular.com. “It’s an opt-in world these days,” he says.
Yaar says the best time for a merchant to get opt-in permission is at the time the customer makes a purchase. “At that point, they’ve made an investment in the product and they’re really a retention customer,” he says.
Another way to forge ties with consumers is through e-mail newsletters, Carr says. “We communicate to our clients to be generous with information rather than sending their prospects a weekly ad for their services,” he says. “They’ve got to think about their targets and what they’re concerned about, then tailor newsletters and e-mails that are going to enrich their lives.”
It’s about brevity
To make it more likely that consumers will open an e-mail, retailers should display their name, rather than their address, in the From field of the e-mail message, says Mike Adams, president and CEO, Arial Software, an e-mail software company. “The number-one way a customer is going to trust you from day one is looking at the From name in the e-mail,” he says. “They recognize that, yes, they ordered something from you, you’re a trusted company.”
The body of the e-mail message also affects whether the consumer acts on the message. “E-mail is about brevity,” Baker says, adding that people make a decision on e-mail in about three seconds. “I can’t tell you exactly what content works and what doesn’t. But if the intent of the message is promotional and you can’t push that impression in three to five seconds, you’re failing.”
A recent Arial survey found that by an eight-to-one ratio, customers preferred a table of contents with a web link to a text message. “They don’t want the e-mail to be full of content, where they have to scroll down,” Adams says. “That finding surprised me because a couple of years ago it was about 50-50.”
Adams attributes the change in attitudes to the heavy volume of e-mail consumers have to contend with. “People have such a short amount of time to spend on each e-mail,” he says. “If it’s not right there in the preview pane, they’re going to trash it.”
What a retailer puts in the subject line of an e-mail also can make a difference. “The subject line is extremely important, and it will continue to be,” Carr says. “Make sure it’s consistent, make sure it’s informative so they know what you’re sending.”
Prominently displaying information about opt-out lists and other CAN-Spam requirements on web sites also can help online merchants win the trust of their customers, Carr says. “When a user sees all this information, sees that you’re making your best effort to protect them, they’re more likely to trust you,” he says. “When they trust you, they’re going to be more open and respond.”
The importance of frequency
Starting off messages with a statement that the customer requested e-mail updates also can increase the effectiveness of the message, Yaar says. “We’ve seen some fairly substantial—high single to low double-digit—increases in click-throughs when you include sentences like ‘you’ve requested that we inform you once a week about the following things.’”
Placing instructions in large print on how to unsubscribe to a newsletter also can make consumers more comfortable with an e-retailer, Yaar says. “You are sending your customer the implicit message that we understand you may not want this information so we’re going to make it easy for you to remove yourself.”
The frequency of e-mail also can make or break a campaign. Carr counsels merchants to send e-mails only once a month or every few weeks, unless they have something really powerful to offer consumers, for example, coupons or a link to a daily news site. Indeed, more frequent mailings could drive consumers away because they will be perceived as junk mail.
Still there are customers who want to get daily e-mail updates, Sweetser says. “There’s a loyal customer base that wants to get their deal of the day,” he says. “That type of frequency is really dependent on the audience.”
For the retailers e-Dialog works with, customers select the frequency via a permission-based pop-up box on a weekly or monthly newsletter, Sweetser says.
Once retailers establish a relationship with customers via e-mail, they still face another challenge: getting through the spam filters of ISPs. Getting past those barriers is a combination of science and art, Sweetser says. E-Dialog does spam reviews of clients’ e-mail campaigns to head off problems. “Content with the word ‘free’ capitalized and bolded twelve times is just screaming to be filtered and put into bulk mail,” he says.
e-Dialog , like other e-mail marketers, has mailboxes with the major ISPs and checks them daily to see whether clients’ e-mails were delivered, he adds.
Despite all the obstacles, e-mail marketing will continue to be an important tool for online retailers, observers say. For one thing, it’s cheaper than other types of advertising—about a penny per name compared with 50 cents to $1 per piece of direct mail or catalogs.
It also gives online retailers the ability to change messages on short notice, as opposed to print and other ad campaigns where changes take weeks or even months.
Strategy focus
It appears that more online retailers are beginning to take the advice of e-mail marketers, Sweetser says. “Clients are more strategy focused,” he says. “It’s not about just getting it out the door, but who are we sending it to, what are we trying to learn, what deeper insight are we trying to get, and then applying that.”
As for now, online retailer’s heavy reliance on e-mail marketing continues.
In fact, e-mail marketing has the most value as a retention tool, Yaar says. The use of e-mail to acquire customers is losing effectiveness—as much as a 20% to 30% drop—as search engine optimization increases, Yaar says. “But as a retention tool, e-mail is still very, very powerful, because it can draw customers back to sites,” he says.

There’s a new strategy in the spam battle: Call it containment.Filters for blocking junk e-mail from inboxes have improved to the point that doing much more will needlessly kill legitimate e-mail, said Carl Hutzler, America Online Inc.’s anti-spam coordinator. So e-mail gatekeepers are shifting gears.Now they’re getting more aggressive at keeping spam from leaving their systems in the first place.EarthLink Inc., for instance, is phasing in a requirement that customers’ mail programs submit passwords before it will send out their e-mail.Like most Internet providers, EarthLink previously made sure only that a computer was associated with a legitimate account. Now that viruses can co-opt computers and use them to send spam, that’s no longer secure enough.So Earthlink sent out new software, made automated tools available for download and walked customers through manually changing their mail settings when they called tech support for other reasons. A year into the initiative, EarthLink has 80 percent of its customers converted.“Any action can be a little daunting when you’re trying to migrate millions of people,” said Stephen Currie, EarthLink’s director of communications products.It also costs time and money — not insignificant considering that direct benefits don’t necessarily go to EarthLink but to its competitors, whose customers might otherwise receive more spam.But more than altruism was involved.“If there’s a lot of spam or abusive mail coming from a particular network, in the future you’re going to see that e-mail having low rates of deliverability,” Currie said.In other words, other Internet service providers, or ISPs, might start blocking EarthLink e-mail if it doesn’t adopt the outbound controls.The pressure to improve outbound controls comes as viruses infect more and more home computers and convert them into spam-relayng “zombies.”These zombies allow spammers to pose as legitimate customers and get around blocks that Internet providers might have had in place.Although antispam advocates say Internet providers can do more to stop spammers from signing up for accounts — sometimes fraudulently, but too often because they mean revenues and sales commissions — Hutzler blames zombies for 90 percent of the spam problem.Traditional spam controls, the inbound filters, don’t work as well with zombies because they can block mail from legitimate customers, too. Outbound controls can target specific zombies.“The best place to stop spam is before it’s sent,” said John Reid, a volunteer with The Spamhaus Project anti-spam group. “If you can keep it in the bag, bottled up, that’s where it’s the least expensive.”Outbound controls aren’t entirely new.For years, anti-spam advocates have been pressuring Internet providers to configure mail servers so spammers can’t use them to relay junk e-mail. The leading vendor of mail server software, Sendmail Inc., closed such relays by default in 1998, and most ISPs now have the newer software.EarthLink and AOL also have long implemented a technique that forces customers to route e-mail through the providers’ own mail servers, instead of sending messages directly to the Internet.Other ISPs are starting to adopt it as well, giving them the ability to monitor outgoing mail, trace any problems to specific accounts and even block or place speed limits on e-mail that exceeds some hourly or daily threshold.ISPs can also run the spam and virus filters on outbound mail.And when users of Microsoft Corp.’s Hotmail try to send a large number of messages, they are prompted to type in random letters displayed on the screen. Presumably, spammers with automated tools wouldn’t be able to do it.If all ISPs were to implement outbound controls, spam wouldn’t be such a headache.But outbound measures are often difficult to justify because they don’t directly pare down the junk in customers’ inboxes as inbound filters do, said Anne Mitchell, who runs the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, an antispam consultancy.Mitchell said ISPs are businesses and “have to look at the bottom line and their profitability.”Besides implementation costs, outbound measures can hurt legitimate customers.Businesses and some individuals might have a legitimate need to access third-party mail servers, and being forced to go through their providers’ systems might cause their e-mail to be mistakenly tagged as spam by the recipient.Anytime ISPs make changes, they will invariably discover a few customers who use their service in an unanticipated, but legitimate manner, said John Levine, co-author of “Fighting Spam for Dummies.”Martin Deen, manager of messaging engineering at Cox Communications Inc., likens outbound measures to vaccination. They may be good for the overall health of the Internet if all ISPs do it, Deen said, but individual ISPs take a personal risk.ISPs sometimes grant exceptions for businesses and power users.AOL has a few thousand customers, out of more than 28 million, who are exempt from caps on multiple mails.Desert Express Internet Services, a small ISP serving California and Nevada, waived its restrictions for one of its business customers — but only if it agreed in writing to run spam filters on outgoing mail and meet other requirements.Ultimately, ISPs may require customers with special needs to buy a premium service.“We don’t do that, (but) that would be a possibility certainly,” EarthLink’s Currie said. “EarthLink and other ISPs are just going to define their services, and certain things will be permitted and certain won’t.”

Cable operator Telewest has had the email addresses of its one million or so Internet customers blacklisted by the anti-spam organisation the Spam Prevention Early Warning System. The organisation says that it has taken the decision to blacklist all of Telewest's Blueyonder customers because so many of them have been hijacked and used as spam servers.
As spam filters have become more sophisticated and their own email servers have been blocked by spam filters, the spammers have turned to other methods to get their messages across. Increasingly this has meant that spammers have turned to the methods used by virus writers to hijack machines with malicious code.
Often hundreds or thousands of machines are recruited into these armies of 'bots' which can be used to generate thousands of email messages. A recent survey says that up to a million PCs have been compromised in this way. Machines are often compromised by a lack of a firewall and antivirus software designed to prevent intrusions.
Spam filters have no way of checking whether these thousands of machines are all legitimate or not. Hence, Spew has used the rather blunt weapon of blocking all of Telewest's email traffic. As a consequence, the move is likely to severely restrict the mail sent out by Telewest's customers.
The SPEW system, used by a range of ISPs and spam filters, checks the sender field of each email. If it comes from an email address known to be sending spam, it is simply blocked.
In a statement, Telewest said 'We are aware of the increase in e-mail volumes due to customers' PCs which have been infected by worms and viruses . We are currently contacting affected customers to help them clean their PCs which, as you can imagine, is a time-consuming task'
The decision is likely to prove an embarrassment to Telewest. After several years of financial woes, the company is finally moving towards its long anticipated merger with rival NTL. What it does not need is customers deserting its broadband service because their mail is bouncing.

Ipswitch, Inc, the leading developer of messaging, network management and file transfer solutions for small to medium businesses (SMBs), announces the release of Ipswitch Collaboration Suite (ICS) 2.0. New anti-spam technology, available in ICS Premium and ISP editions, features spam profiles handcrafted by human editors to thwart the latest efforts in spam attacks.
"We have incorporated sophisticated anti-spam technology into Ipswitch Collaboration Suite 2.0 that is so easy to use, the only configuration administrators must perform is to turn on the protection," said Alex Neihaus, Ipswitch vice-president of marketing.
"By combining the best of automated spam catching methods with hand review by multilingual human editors, we are restoring the reliability of messaging infrastructures. Collaboration is a cornerstone of doing business and companies cannot do enough to protect this vital part of their business communications."
More than 60 million people worldwide use Ipswitch messaging products to communicate over the Internet. Ipswitch Collaboration Suite is based upon IMail Server, a proven, scalable messaging server ideal for companies with tens to thousands of workers. ICS also includes secure instant messaging, server-based shared calendaring capabilities and free/busy functionality for Microsoft Outlook users, as well as anti-spam and anti-virus protection. ICS Premium edition users are protected by Symantec carrier-class anti-virus technology, which combines automatic, non-disruptive updates with advanced customisation capabilities to allow administrators fine control of their anti-virus defences.
Users of ICS Standard edition receive anti-virus technology using the BitDefender scanning engine.
ICS Premium Anti-Spam is powered by Mail-Filters.com's Star Engine on the ICS server, which receives dynamic Bullet Signature Database updates from Mail-Filters. Bullet Signatures are continuously created and updated at Mail-Filters' data centre via automated means and with a final review in over 30 languages by human editors.
Every five minutes, ICS 2.0 Premium Anti-Spam checks for new Bullet Signatures, which are then used by the Star Engine to catch incoming spam. The Star Engine component of ICS identifies spammer tricks by spotting suspicious misspellings, phishing attacks and other unique spam-identifying characteristics. ICS Premium Anti-Spam is tuned to look for very specific tricks and ignores general factors that can generate false positives. This sophisticated processing results in superior throughput at the ICS server, maximum catch rates and extraordinarily low false-positives. More impressively, administrators need only check one check box on the ICS server to effectively protect their messaging infrastructure from spam attacks and restore confidence in the delivery of business-critical e-mail.

In the decade or so since Web access became a consumer commodity, we've fixed many things about the Internet, from the pokey speed limit of dial-up modems to browsers that crash three times an hour. But spam is a bigger nuisance than ever. It starts taking its toll long before it lands in your inbox. First, spammers employ spyware and viruses to hijack home and office computers for use as unwitting relays for junk e-mail. Then your Internet provider must spend time and money running filters, lest its computers be swamped. The junk e-mail that inevitably leaks through wastes your time and bandwidth as you wait for each message to download. Almost all of it insults your intelligence and good sense; spam assumes we're drug-addicted, money-grubbing, porn-addled fools ready to click on any stupid offer.
And the single worst thing about spam? Enough recipients do click on those stupid offers to keep spammers in business. Nobody has found a technological fix for spam. The Internet's design puts a priority on the free flow of data. Internet providers, too many of which still whore themselves out to spammers, and spammers' own cockroach-like tenacity all but ensure there won't be. Because the Internet spans the world, laws aren't likely to solve this problem either, although I am always delighted to see spammers being litigated into poverty, fined into bankruptcy or imprisoned until senility sets in. Spam can, however, be managed. You can make your e-mail address a smaller target for spammers, and you can shunt aside a healthy chunk of the spam that does find you. If you can keep your address off spammers' lists, you will get little or no junk e-mail. So never post your e-mail address on any public spot on the Web, and be choosy about giving it to strangers or companies. Throwaway account Instead, create a second, throwaway account at any of the free Web-mail services, such as Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or Gmail, and use that for online commerce. Most Web sites won't share your address with the world — but a few might, so why chance it? This method will not, however, defeat a dictionary attack, in which spammers send messages to randomly chosen names at popular Internet providers. Having an address with an unusual spelling or at a lesser-known provider can reduce vulnerability. When spam arrives, never respond to it. And make sure your mail software isn't doing that for you: If it displays a picture in a spam message, it often does so by downloading the image from the spammer's Web site, which tells the sender you just read the spam. Current releases of the major mail programs — Microsoft's Outlook Express and Outlook, Apple's Mail, Qualcomm's Eudora and Mozilla's Thunderbird —won't display pictures in mail from strangers. But older versions will, so upgrade now. You'd think that writing a program to delete spam would be easy, since even an Internet beginner can tell spam from real mail. But that hasn't happened —yet another way in which the computer can't match the human brain. Your Internet provider's spam filtering will usually sweep the worst offenders out of sight, but some adopt an excessively strict policy that wrongly tags innocent e-mails as spam. Last winter, for example, Verizon's filtering suddenly began flushing away many legitimate e-mails sent from parts of Europe and Asia. Filtering spam If you use your own mail program instead of a Web interface such as Hotmail or Yahoo, you can run your own spam filters. The best learn from your use, watching what mail you label as spam and adjusting their screening to match. Mozilla Thunderbird (www.mozilla.org) and Apple's Mail, both free, include this type of filter, as does the $50 edition of Qualcomm's Eudora (www.eudora.com). Microsoft's Outlook 2003, by contrast, has a non-learning spam filter, while its free Outlook Express includes no spam block. You can add a learning filter to either program with various add-ons; some, such as POPFile (popfile.sourceforge.net) and SpamPal (www.spampal.org), are free but may require tricky configuration; others, such as SpamBully (www.spambully.com) cost money. A more stringent defense, “challenge-response” filtering, requires would-be correspondents to pass a simple test online that a bulk mailer can't or won't bother to complete--usually, visiting a Web page and typing in letters shown in an image. Some Internet providers--notably, EarthLink--and such add-on software as ChoiceMail (www.digiportal.com) and SpamArrest (www.spamarrest.com) offer it. But although these systems wave through mail from people in your address book, other legitimate senders must perform extra work. Challenge-response has not been widely adopted. All of these techniques can only treat spam. A cure will have to be economic: When no money can be made from spam, nobody will send it. Filters, lawsuits and fines can raise the costs of sending junk e-mail, but there's still money to be made by defrauding the gullible.