This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Why Not Spam?
Right up front, let me repeat: sending spam is not a responsible use of the power of the Internet and you ought not to do it. If you buy that statement straight up, you can skip this section. If, like a lot of my clients, you are curious to know what is so wrong with spam, read on.
What can you do with email? The first obvious response from early Internet business people was to get lists of email addresses for all potential customers and send them promotional messages. After all, email is free, right?
As it turns out, email is anything but free. Unlike junk mail, for which the sender pays the cost of the postage and the mail piece and therefore the full cost of its delivery, the cost of email is borne mostly by the recipient, or more accurately, by the person who operates the recipient's email server. If you buy Internet access from AOL, for example, along with your Web access, you also get email from AOL. When anyone sends junk email to you, AOL bears the cost. Of course, that cost is ultimately passed on to you and the other AOL subscribers in the form of higher costs than there would be if there were no spam.
When the post office receives complaints about junk mail, they are not especially sympathetic. After all, they make good money from all that junk mail because postal rates are set so that each class of mail pays its own way. However, when a recipient of spam (junk email) complains to her Internet Service Provider (ISP) who also usually operates her email server, she gets a very sympathetic hearing. Outfits like AOL and MSN don't want to handle such mail because it arrives in great quantities, tying up the server and forcing them to invest in more computers and in greater bandwidth to handle it all. The ISP responds to all this unwanted traffic in a variety of ways. First they set up email "filters" to automatically reject mail coming from Inter-net addresses and domains that are suspected of sending spam. When some spam does get through the filters, the email system operator or SYSOP (short for system operator) traces the email back to its origins and complains (loudly!) to the person operating the sending email server, and to the host of any Web sites referred to in the message, and to all their respective upstream connection services. The result? A minute or two after the first batch of spam is noticed by an activist recipient or an alert SYSOP, the sender's email account and Web site are closed.
SPAM AND THE INTERNET
The Hormel company does not think that disparaging their canned meat product in this way is funny at all, but they have pretty well accepted the reality that spam now refers both to a tasty canned meat product and the junk email we all love to hate. Below is an official statement excerpted from the Hormel website (http://hormel.com) on Janu-ary 8, 2001.
"You've probably seen, heard or even used the term 'spamming' to refer to the act of sending unsolicited commercial email (UCE), or 'SPAM' to refer to the UCE itself. Following is our position on the relationship between UCE and our trademark SPAM.
"Use of the term 'SPAM' was adopted as a result of the Monty Python skit in which a group of Vikings sang a chorus of 'SPAM, SPAM, SPAM ' in an increasing crescendo, drowning out other conversation. Hence, the analogy applied because UCE was drowning out normal discourse on the Internet.
"We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.
"This slang term does not affect the strength of our trademark SPAM. In a Federal District Court case involving the famous trademark STAR WARS owned by LucasFilms, the Court ruled that the slang term used to refer to the Strategic Defense Initiative did not weaken the trademark and the Court refused to stop its use as a slang term. Other examples of famous trademarks having a different slang meaning include MICKEY MOUSE, to describe something as unsophisticated; TEFLON, used to describe President Reagan; and CADILLAC, used to denote something as being high quality."
Position Statement on "Spamming"
"We oppose the act of 'spamming' or sending unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). We have never engaged in this practice, although we have been victimized by it. If you have been one of those who has received UCE with a return address using our website address of SPAM.com, it wasn't us. It's easy and commonplace for somebody sending UCE to simply adopt a fake header ID, which disguises the true source of the UCE and makes it appear that it is coming from someone else. If you have or do receive UCE with this header ID, please understand that it didn't come from us."
Source: Hormel Web site: http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm, accessed 4-13-2001. With permission.
A rather large group of self-appointed anti-spam vigilantes have arisen to fight the "evil spammers." These folks have developed sophisticated and aggressive methods for thwarting spam. They take tremendous delight in mounting campaigns to have targeted domains which they suspect of harboring spammers banned from important areas of the Internet such as AOL and MSN. Obviously, if a domain is blocked from sending mail to AOL's 22-plus million subscribers, the spammers using that domain are greatly disadvantaged in their promotional efforts.
The primary weapon anti-spam activists use is the email filter. The domain names of ISPs and other email server operators who are found to be allowing spam-mers to send their mail, are relegated to the dreaded "Realtime Blackhole List" (RBL). Here is how it works. Think of the domain name as the "city" part of the In-ternet address. Once an operator's domain name has been placed in the RBL, all the other Internet operators who subscribe to the free RBL service, and a large majority of ISPs do subscribe, will automatically block all of the email originating from the offending operator's server. That is analogous to all the post offices in the country automatically rejecting any mail from Cincinnati! The businesses and people who live in Cincinnati may soon choose to live elsewhere if they cannot get their mail out! The same is true for the Internet, only faster. Once a user realizes that her email cannot get through to her friends, she does not care why. She is gone in less than a week. If you want to get the attention of an ISP, just threaten to put their domain name into the RBL and watch them fall all over themselves to correct the problem.
ORGANIZED ANTI-SPAM EFFORTS
THE REALTIME BLACK HOLE LIST (RBL)
(HTTP://MAPS.VIX.COM/RBL/)
This project, run by Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC (MAPS) began in 1997. MAPS maintains a list of all the sources they can identify from which spam appears to originate. The Internet address of each of these sources, once identified as a source of spam, is added to the RBL. Thousands of cooperating ISPs routinely block these blacklisted sources, rendering them inaccessible to all the subscribers of the cooperating ISPs. Those in the RBL cannot then send or receive email. Any Web pages that reside on these blacklisted sites cannot be seen by the cooperating ISPs' subscribers.
The stated purpose of the MAPS RBL is to punish the ISPs who harbor spammers, and so encourage them to police their subscribers' activities, canceling accounts as needed to prevent spamming.
OPEN RELAY BEHAVIOR-MODIFICATION SYSTEM (ORBS)
(HTTP://WWW.ORBS.ORG/)
ORBS is a system that looks for email servers worldwide that permit so-called third party relaying of email. Such servers are added to the ORBS list, and that list is then used by thousands of legitimate ISPs to block traffic from the listed sites. Spammers routinely search for such relay servers because by routing their spam through an offshore server, say somewhere in Yugoslavia or Brunei, they can more effectively hide their identity and location from those who would like to use their "smite thee" button (if they had one, that is). Another reason spammers are likely to hijack these accessible servers is that they are frequently run by novices to the Internet world who are unaware of the penalties for permitting spam.
It is testament to the economic power of email that we still, in spite of these significant and powerful disincentives, find our email boxes brimming with spam every day. Email works!
Two kinds of businesses that routinely use spam are get-rich-quick and porn vendors. Since these fringe businesses have a difficult time keeping a Web site up even when they use more legitimate promotional methods, they must figure they have little to lose by employing spam. Their markets tend to be very general, with almost any email recipient a potential customer for these "products."
WHO ARE THESE SPAMMERS?
Jason Heckel has the dubious distinction of being the first spammer to be sued under the Washington state anti-spam law. Jason was a 24-year-old man living in Oregon when he decided to use spam to sell a 47-page booklet he wrote, titled How to Profit from the Internet. According to newspaper reports, he used a bulk email program called Extractor Pro to harvest email addresses from the Web and then to send from 100,000 to 1,000,000 messages a week advertising his $39.95 booklet. His sales were reported to be around 40 books, or approximately $1,600 a month. Fortunately for Mr. Heckel, the suit was thrown out as being unconstitutional. Following the ordeal of the lawsuit, however, Mr. Heckel has reportedly stopped spamming.
Sam Khuri, owner of the Benchmark Print Supply Company of At-lanta, Georgia, was sued for spamming by BiblioTech, his ISP located in London, England. Khuri was selling toner cartridges using an email promotion. The problem for the ISP was that a large volume of email messages Khuri attempted to send had incorrect email addresses. As a result, the BiblioTech mail server was overloaded by all the "bounced" mail and was actually down for three days.
Adrian Paris, operating under the business name ProPhoto UK back in 1998, sent more than a quarter of a million email messages using the ISP Virgin Net. When the ISP began receiving complaints and demanded that Paris stop sending his spam, he apologized, claiming the emails were sent out by mistake and promised to stop. He then set up another Virgin Net account and recommenced spamming. This time, though, his efforts caused Virgin Net to be added to the Real-Time Black Hole List (RBL), the ultimate weapon of the anti-spam vigilantes, which greatly impedes the ability of legitimate email to move through the ISP and can even mean the demise of the ISP as a viable business. Virgin Net then sued Paris following his repeated spamming efforts. The lawsuit was settled before reaching court, with Paris agreeing to pay about $8,000 in damages and to cease spamming through the Virgin Net system. Paris was selling bulk email lists of 1 to 10 million addresses, for about $40 to $250.
Let me say to any of you still thinking about having a go at spamming, just realize that using pure spam will relegate you to the lower reaches of the on- and offline communities. You may find it embarrassing to admit to your friends and business associates that you are a spammer. Your spouse will probably give you flack for doing it. Hostesses at restaurants will make you sit near the kitchen door, and drivers will yell obscenities at you. Dealing with the people who offer such spam support services as bulk email lists, bulk mail software, bulk-safe Web sites, and bulk-safe email accounts may make you feel like showering more often. The odds are very good that you will get taken lots of times before you find anybody reliable in that support community. You can expect to buy host space and email accounts that promptly get closed down, despite your having paid hundreds of dollars extra for these services because some smiling con artist has assured you that his email account service is bulk friendly. In this community the terms are always cash in advance and no refunds. This is the floating crap game of the Internet world, and the dice are most definitely loaded. Play this game at your own risk, and don't say you weren't warned.