lectronic junk mail is the scourge of the Internet. More commonly called spam, junk e-mail wastes money and time, it turns people away from the Internet, and most of it is just plain ugly.
Last month, system administrators from all over the United States met in California at the Third Spam Roundtable to discuss the growing problem. The results were not encouraging. Between 15 percent and 30 percent of the e-mail that America Online receives is spam. Most large Internet service providers have four to six people dedicated to combating the problem; unsolicited commercial e-mail costs these companies roughly $1 million each month, which translates to $1 to $2 per subscriber.
But here's the real kicker: The junk e-mail problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.
It's the crazy economics of the Internet that created the junk e-mail problem. Unlike a piece of paper mail, which costs 25 cents to $1 to send, there is no per-message charge to send e-mail: It's included in your monthly fee. Although this works out great for people who want to keep in touch, the economics lend themselves to abuse. All a spammer needs to send out a million messages is a dial-up Internet account, a million e-mail addresses, and a computer.
Earlier this year, a friend of mine visited an AOL chat room called ''Parent Soup.'' A few days later, her mailbox was filled with 40 messages directing her to gay pornographic Web sites. In all likelihood, a spammer had been monitoring the chat room, and added her e-mail address to his list. If you are an AOL user, practically the only way to protect yourself is to use a different screen name for chat rooms than for e-mail.
According to a survey conducted earlier this year by ChooseYourMail
.com, pornographers are responsible for 30.2 percent of the spam on the Internet today. Just behind the sex merchants, 29.6 percent of spam hawks get-rich-quick and work- from-home schemes, many of them illegal. The remainder advertised assorted products and services; a small percentage illegally offer stock tips.
It used to be that the best way to protect yourself from being spammed was to be cagey with your e-mail address. If you avoided putting your e-mail address on a Web page, if you didn't participate in on-line discussion groups, if you didn't join chat sessions, you were pretty safe.
But hiding your e-mail address is becoming less effective every day. At the Spam Roundtable, I learned that more and more spammers are resorting to dictionary attacks, where they send e-mail to any address that's likely to be valid. If the message gets through, that's great for the spammer. If the message bounces, the spammer doesn't care.
Although some states have passed laws that attempt to regulate spam, none have been particularly successful. Federal attempts, meanwhile, have been worse. Last year, Senators Frank Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, and Robert Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat, proposed legislation that would have made it illegal to send spam to people who specifically had opted out, or asked not to receive the junk mail, but legal to send it to everyone else. Although the bill passed the Senate, it died in a House committee.
Many antispam activists opposed the legislation because it legitimized spam. For the same reason, many spammers rallied behind it.
But the real spam problem in the coming year won't be from fly-by-night operations and scam artists, it will be from legitimate companies that view unsolicited bulk e-mail as a way to market themselves more effectively.
Imagine how much e-mail you would get if every store where you ever had shopped, or every store where you ever might shop, sent you an e-mail once a week telling you about a special offer. Your e-mail quickly would become unusable.
This January, the Direct Marketing Association will announce an opt-out database for electronic mail called the e-Mail Preference Service. The database is supposed to be a list of people who do not wish to receive marketing information by e-mail. That sounds good at first, but many spam-fighters fear that the DMA will use its database to legitimize e-mail marketing in general. This argument has merit, since the DMA's two other databases, the Telephone Preference Service and the Mail Preference Service, have been used to legitimize telemarketing and paper junk mail.
So what's a computer user to do?
Today there are a number of filters that you can use to separate the spam mail from the good mail. The best filter that I have seen is BrightMail. Although it's designed to be used by Internet service providers and corporations, the company recently started up a service for individuals. You can find out more at http://www.brightmail.com/.
The second way to fight spam is with legislation. Write to your lawmakers and tell them what you think about junk e-mail. The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail has put up a detailed information center about legislative attempts to stop spam at http://www.cauce.org/.
If you get spam e-mail, you can send it to the Spam Recycling Center, at spamrecycle@ChooseYourMail.com. For information, check out http://www.spamrecycle.com/.
Finally, you can tell the stores where you shop that you don't want them sending you e-mail. And if catalog companies ask for your e-mail address, don't tell them.
Technology columnist Simson Garfinkel can be reached at http://chat.simson.net/
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