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This article appeared in the June 2001 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
My mother doesn't want to get e-mail from "Julie" who promises a "...good time, if you click here." Mom uses America Online for her e-mail, does almost no Web browsing, and only corresponds with her children and friends. But, "Julie" and a host of other net entrepreneurs somehow got hold of her address and insist on sending her offers for everything from free Internet service (if she buys their computer) to get-rich-quick investment schemes (diamonds from darkest Africa). She'd prefer to not see any of this mail, but she'll sometimes get a dozen in one day.
People such as my mother are pretty much helpless prey for the darker side of the Internet because they lack the technical know-how to fight back. People like "Julie" make too many people such as my mother believe the Internet is little more than a haven for vile pornographers and con artists.
Mail from "Julie" is known politely as unsolicited commercial e-mail--UCE for short. But, there's no reason to be polite about it, so most people just call it spam. I've never been a big fan of the canned meat from Hormel--it looks too much like cat food--but at least I can avoid it (www.spam.com). E-mail spam is beginning to seem unavoidable.
Spam is a funny form of advertising because the spammer wants you as a customer, but doesn't really want to hear from you. The messages from "Julie" lead to a Web site with no e-mail addresses, but plenty of titillating teasers and places to enter your credit card number to see more. The investment opportunities can only be had by calling some phone number that's probably answered in the Cayman Islands.
A well-publicized example showing how hard these people try to hide is the case of Engst vs. Worldtouch. Adam Engst is well-known as a Macintosh journalist, author of computer books and publisher of the weekly Macintosh-oriented e-mail newsletter called TidBITS (www.tidbits.com). In July 1998, soon after Washington state passed anti-spam legislation, Engst and several other TidBITS editors filed suit against Worldtouch Network, Inc. and its owner Christopher Lee Knight. They soon learned that Worldtouch was not incorporated at all and Christopher Lee Knight turned out to be one of several aliases. It took more than a year and three private investigators to sort it all out. In April 2000, shortly before the suit was scheduled for trial, Washington's anti-spam law was declared unconstitutional under the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. The opinion held that the law is "unduly restrictive and burdensome on businesses."
Anyone who's tried to stop getting spam knows how obnoxious and persistent the spammers really are. You usually can't reply and ask to be taken off their mailing lists because the return addresses on their e-mail are most often fake. And even when they aren't fake, complaining won't do any good because any replies get added to their list of people who actually read the stuff. Replying is like pouring gasoline on the fire because they now have a live address to sell to other like-minded business creatures.
For those with the technical expertise to try tracing the headers on e-mail, the spammers have added fake entries and dead ends to make tracing the e-mail's origins like trying to travel a maze. In the worst cases, they have secretly piggybacked a ride on somebody else's misconfigured mail relay machine, pumping tens of thousands of messages through it, and making it nearly impossible to figure out who's really sending the e-mail.
So, what's to be done?
At least half the states and Congress have been grappling with this question for three or four years. On one hand are the free speech advocates who try to equate spam with the mountain of paper junk mail we all get in our snail-mail boxes. "UCE is one of the prices of free speech," they cry. "You can always delete it." On the other hand, the opponents point out that commercial snail-mail is paid for by the sender, while spam is paid for by the receiver who is buying Internet access.
Although the issue apparently has yet to be addressed by Kentucky government, least fifteen states have passed laws trying to regulate spam. Washington, California and Virginia passed laws requiring spammers to get permission before adding addresses to their lists. Several states are also making it illegal to have fake return addresses or headers. The result is that the laws are being challenged and the spammers are moving their operations overseas. As noted above, some of the laws have failed constitutional challenge.
Those of us who've been fighting the scourge for years have our own strategies for dealing with the nuisance. Here are a few things I've tried that help--a little.
One of the main techniques spammers use to harvest e-mail addresses is programs that automatically scour public sites like USENET news groups and Web pages. A good way to combat this is to have more than one e-mail address. Keep your main address close to your chest. Never post it to any public forum, and certainly don't use it when corresponding with anyone you suspect might add it to a spam list. Use an expendible address for your public messages. Hotmail is a wonderful place to park a junk-mail address (www.hotmail.com); let Bill Gates pay for your spam--he can afford it. If the spam gets out of control, you can always turn off your junk-mail address and set up a different one.
Another variation on this scheme is to use a service like SpamCop (spamcop.net). You can get a free e-mail address through SpamCop to use in public places. SpamCop has an extensive list of spammers, and they automatically reject spam-like mail.
Much of the SpamCop filtering can be done by yourself with the filtering built into most e-mail programs. If the unwanted e-mail has an identifiable pattern, you can set up a filter to automatically route it into the trash. Microsoft Outlook Express has a built-in spam filter that really does work to catch a lot of junk mail. Unfortunately, it catches too much stuff, such as listserve digests and legitimate press releases. There are also many spam filters available for Eudora. Head over to VersionTracker (versiontracker.com) and do a search on "spam" to find them. Again, the problem is that they usually catch too much stuff.
I use a program on my Linux-based IMAP server called Procmail. Over the last couple of years, I've carefully set up filters that catch a lot of the spam and route it into a mailbox that I check and empty about once per week. It'll typically catch about fifty messages between cleanings. Many Internet service providers let their users set up Procmail filters on the mail servers. Of course, the same thing can be done on the receiving end with Outlook Express or Eudora.
An interesting idea is a program by Scott Gruby called, appropriately, "I Hate Spam." It's designed to work with Eudora. When you open a piece of spam, you can click on an unobtrusive little "No Spam" window and the program works its way through the headers of the spam to compose an e-mail to be sent back through the computers the spam took on its way to you. Gruby is no longer supporting the program, but it still works (www.gruby.com/downloads.shtml).
This brings me back to the AOL problem my mother is having. I called up AOL tech support, and they commiserated, but admitted there's not much that can be done. The first suggestion was to "turn off Internet mail access for a day or two" in hopes the spammers would go away. Although I don't hold out much hope for that to work, we're trying it. The other suggestion was to "change the screen name" so the e-mail address goes away. The problem with this is that she would then have to notify all her family and friends about the new address. Either method might get rid of spammers for a while, but I have no doubt they'll be back--probably more sooner than later.
I've always thought the government should keep its hands off the Internet, but it's beginning to look like new laws might be the only way to put spam back in the can.
The speaker at the June LCS meeting will be Bill King. His topic will be wireless networking.
The Louisville Computer Society meets 7:00-9:00 P.M. on the fourth Tuesday of each month at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the Web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
The LCS also sponsors an e-mail discussion list devoted to Macintosh topics. To join, send e-mail containing only the words "subscribe macgroup" to majordomo@erdos.math.louisville.edu.
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