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Lynn Says: Internet Spam is Difficult to Stop
04/16/03
By Lynn L. Martin
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AOL, the nation's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) has around 30 million subscribers. Over 1 billion pieces of junk mail (spam) addressed to AOL users generated more than 8 million complaints.
It is difficult to imagine the cost to AOL. If one employee could investigate 50 of complaints per day, it would require 160,000 full time employees to do the job.
AOL, unable to afford 160,000 employees dedicated to the problem, is fighting back. The firm has filed a barrage of five law suits against more than a dozen individuals and companies accused of being major purveyors of "spam."
Sadly, AOL is only one defender against the onslaught of junk email. The flood of spam is growing so fast that it may soon account for half of all U. S. email traffic. Somebody at each business and at each mail account must wade though this hair-pulling annoyance.
A user generally has to look at the email mess piece by piece because some of it is legitimate, which is why he/she obtained the email address in the first place.
According to Ferris Research, Inc., spam will cost U. S. organizations more than $10 billion this year. The figure includes lost productivity, and the added computer capacity to handle the e-mail load.
The millions of unsolicited messages run the gamut from credit card offers, diets, financial schemes, pornography offers, and body part enhancements.
As a comparison, about 40% of the mail handled by the U. S. Postal Service is marketing oriented.
Most people do not realize that whenever they open an HTML based (more "designed looking" than just pure text) email, any graphics included in that email ends up saved on their computer in the temporary Internet directory. This "saving" has occurred even though the user may delete the email immediately after opening it. The graphics in the temporary folder were written with the opening click "to get ready" for you to read the e-mail.
I still do quite a bit of computer repair. I warn people about this problem because the directory containing such graphics is a "system" directory and is hidden by a warning screen that says something like, "You don't really want to go here because you could mess up your computer's operating system."
Yet, that hidden directory can contain graphics the computer user didn't purposely put there. The controlling party in that case was the author of the spam messages.
If your computer is growing sluggish it could be your hard drive is accumulating junk like this and is filling up. I note the Oklahoma legislature is forming laws requiring computer techs to "report" any illegal porn they find on systems on which they work. I'd like to know how the tech will know whether the spammer or the computer user caused the images to end up in a temporary Internet directory.
AOL and other ISP's try to track down the spam generation culprits. For AOL, the front line in the war against spam is inside an unmarked building in Northern Virginia, where a bank of computer screens tracks the volume of e-mail pouring into AOL's system.
On a recent afternoon, an unexpected spike suggested the work of "dictionary" spammers. This is where millions of email addresses are automatically generated by randomly combining numbers and letters with the @aol.com ending.
So if a generated name, such as Mary746, is placed with the AOL ending. The address ends up
mary746@aol.com. The spammer sends out millions of these generated addresses and some of them work.
So the AOL detectives do their work in a back room. This is because some of the web sites they need to examine feature sexually explicit images that some colleagues in the workplace are likely to find offensive.
The team first determines whether AOL's spam filters, which block 1 billion messages a year, need to be adjusted. Meanwhile, another monitor displays the address code for the network and computer that may have sent the suspected spam.
The address is immediately checked against a list of registered domain name owners. The immediate problem, of course, is that some of the addresses show up on the display as "unknown" (just like your caller ID). Many others are obvious fakes, making it difficult to track down and ask them to stop, or to sue them if they don't.
Here are some tips on reducing the amount of spam you receive:
1. Use a long email name. If you have a long name with numbers and letters included, it is far more difficult for a computer to match that with random generation.
2. Have multiple accounts. By using separate accounts for e-commerce and another for personal use, you decrease the chance that your personal address will get spammed.
3. Avoid chat rooms and web-based discussion groups. Spammers are constantly harvesting the Internet for new addresses. They do so by using software to search the web pages. Online chat rooms and news groups are easy targets.
4. Avoid online contests and surveys. These are another prime vehicle for spammers to gather email names.
5. Sadly, "unsubscribe" requests on spam seem only to generate more spam. So I'd skip sending those.