06/29/99

Spam Wars

Unsolicited Commercial Email, or UCE, or spam, as everyone except for lawyers for the Hormel empire call it, is:

1. A plague of Biblical proportions
2. Worse than a pointed stick in the eye
3. Further evidence of man's inhumanity to man
4. More annoying than Jar Jar Binks
5. All of the above

Nonetheless, we were somewhat pleased, here at SNET Internet, when we looked in on the results of the entirely unscientific survey we did on spam two weeks ago. Almost 30 percent of respondents said they get no spam at all; two-thirds reported getting less than five pieces of unsolicited email a week.

Three percent, however, said they get more than 50 unwanted pieces of email a week; almost twenty percent average more than ten unsolicited messages per week.

Personally, I average about five a day. My reaction depends on my mood -- in the morning, I'm apt to be pressed for time and I'll just hit "Delete." In the afternoon, I may be philosophical ("Who are they? Who am I? Why do I get these?") and, in rare moments of clarity, I understand. I get junk email because I have, in some sense, chosen to be a public person on the Internet. I have a home page; I own a domain or two; I write about the Internet; my name and email address are listed in directories. Enduring some spam is the consequence of choices I have made. I hit "Delete."

At night, I am less predictable, being both less pressed for time and less philosophical. I may hit "Delete." I may also take the time to track a piece of spam to source, figure out who was responsible for its transmission and voice my ... um ... displeasure. "Displeasure." Yeah, that's the ticket ...

At any rate, here are some things every SNET Internet user should know about unsolicited email and the people who send it.

• SNET Internet does not give out or sell your email address to anyone. This means that, if you get unsolicited email, the spammer got your email address from somewhere else.

• SNET Internet doesn't tolerate subscribers who send unsolicited email. It's a violation of our terms of service, and we can and do cancel spammer accounts.

• Only rarely, however, will SNET Internet resort to blocking email from another provider to stop spam from coming in to our network. We think it's important to deliver email in a timely manner; blocking email from the outside, other than in extreme circumstances, usually has the effect of blocking at least some mail that subscribers actually want to receive. We don't want to do that.

So: How do these jerks get your email address in the first place?

1. You gave it to them. Yeah, I know, I'm blaming the victim. But anytime, anywhere you gave your email address to someone, you've given up some control. It's on your business card. Maybe you subscribed to a mailing list that, said, in the teensy-tiny print at the bottom, that they would sell your identity to every scam artist in the universe. And -- this is embarrassing, and I have done it -- maybe you signed up to receive some email announcements or regular email information, and then you forgot about it, and when it started arriving, you got plenty mad.

2. You left it somewhere. Again, we're blaming the victim here. Your address is on your web page, or the one your kid set up. You signed someone's Internet "guest book." You posted a comment in an online forum. (I once found an old, non-working email address of mine on a web page that had been generated by a form that I filled out to become member of an online community ... three years earlier.)

3. You got "harvested." In general, no one can find out much about you if you're simply traveling around the web, minding your own business -- but some web sites can take what little information is available from your visit and make an educated guess as to your email address. You'll find tricks like this performed in the seamier neighborhoods of the World Wide Web.

4. Someone else gave your email address to someone. You have enemies or friends with bad senses of humor.

What can you do about it? If you're already getting deluged, there is hope: the war against unsolicited email is being waged by network email administrators around the world, pretty much around the clock. They win some, they lose some. Rarely do they give up.

You can dig a little deeper and find out what other spam-haters are doing. There are spam filters for your email. There are organizations dedicated to stamping out spam. And there are ways to fight back.

Here are some links to get you started:

• Snap's Anti-Spam Page

• The Anti-Spam Tactical HQ offers a hackers-eye view of the war against spam.

• The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email

• Yahoo's "Spam Wars" site.

Please send questions or comments to web.editor@snet.net.