The True Cost of Spam

Spam is certainly a nuisance. It clutters your mail box, makimg the important stuff harder to find. It causes you to miss out on something that may be important, and perhaps to delete “good” email because you are unsure as to its origins. Everything become suspect when you are a victem of spam.

To business, the cost is higher and more serious. A study done a short time ago revealed that the cost to email users exceeds 22 Billion dollrs annually. A very real cost.

Here are some of the implications of spam on your organization.

Hardware resources. This includes both your email servers and your network infrastructure. With upwards of 70% of mail on some large corporation’s email server being unwanted mail, this is a significant drain. It slows down mail delivery for important business mail, and requires industry to add more equipment and faster networks.

User time. Spam takes two forms. The first is the annoying penny stock advertisements, or the cheap drugs or herbal medications. These have been sent without being requested by the user.

The second is the unwanted mail received because at one time you asked to see the demo video of a product you were interested in. And now, these guys are your pen pals.

They are both unrequested mail, but many a user will open them, see what they contain, and maybe even read a couple. So even though they weren’t requested, they eat up precious employee time.

Employees willalso lose time looking for emails that may have accidentally slipped into a junk folder and for reviewing junk folders for “good” mail.

Viruses. With spam arriving at the users desktop, you have increased the risk of a virus coming with it. I have seen too many users being duped by subjecttitles, opening mail from people they don’t know, only to find out later tthey have infected the network. Your last hope after that is for an effective virus checker.

The cost of cleaning up is enormous once the virus is out of the bag.

The IT shop may have people dedicated to keeping filters up to date, verifying security, reading about the latest worm attempts. New products need to be purchased and upgraded to keep the filters current. All at cost to the organization.

Help with control of spam

I hate melodrama, but for purposes of this discussion, let us think of Spam as a cancer. There certainly are similarities we can draw between the two.

1. Once it starts, it grows quickly if unchecked.

2. It can begin through bad lifestyle habits.

3. Its probably easier to avoid than to cure.

4. There are treatments, but some of them may do harm.

In this blog we will discuss briefly one form of cure, known as Spam Filters, and the avoidance, often in the form of abstinence or Disposable Emails.

Lets begin with the lifestyle change. Most of us finally know that smoking, asbestos and gasoline fumes, are sources of health issues. So the smart ones among us, avoid them. There are still a host of other things, not the least of which include luck of the draw, that can give us dreaded diseases.

So it is with email. Clearly we know which sites are less reputable than others, or which stores or organizations, but most of us need to use email sometime! And because you are reading this, I assume you are amongst those who do.  So abstinence is not an answer, but you can still avoid the smoking. Be careful where you use your address. 

Once you get the Spam, you will notice it grows. Wildly! That is because once the spammers realize your email is not bouncing back, they send more. And they give (read that "sell") it to others who then use it. And should you ever, heaven forfend, respond to one of these, the deluge will begin.

There are many types of filters that can be used. Two basic kinds are either

1) based on words or word patterns, or 

2) based on where the email comes from, that is, an IP address.

The problem with the first type, is that it guesses wrong some times, and puts good emails into your junk folder. For example, and this happened to me, Outlook used to classify as junk, any subject line containing "$$$". Well I used that in an email once and my friend never got it.

So you are still left with checking your Junk Mail all the time for errors, so what have you solved?

The other problem is that these emails still "hit" you server, and take up processing and bandwidth resources, until they are identified as Spam.

The IP address approach is based on a list maintained by the spam service. It also can fail by omitting an IP address from their list, or getting over zealous with their rating (as happened to a local reputable service provider who was declared as a spam service).

Disposable Email addresses are part of the healthy email life style. They give you the closest to complete protection (IMHO).

Why?

Because you never use your email address. You use an Alias address. That is, one that "forwards" you email to your real address. The advantages are:

1. You still use the same email address where you wish which to receive your mail, and the same inbox.

2. If spam does arrive, you can shut down the alias, and thats the end of that!

3. You can create an Alias for each correspondent, allowing you complete control over what you shut down, and also informing you of who the "bad guys" are.

4. You never waste computer resources on the spam, because its filtered out before it reaches your inbox.

disposable emails need to meet the following criteria in order to be effective.

1. You should be able to create new ones at will, with no effort (i.e.: just the act of using them!).

2. They should be trashable, with a click or two.

3. I t should be easy to determine which of the disposable emails is the culprit

4. There must be a registration process which provides security to you. 

5. And the emails need to be "live for as little or as long as you like"e

I look forward to hearing your experiences.

What is this stuff and why is it bothering me?

Before attempting to explain why some people seem to think you might benefit from inexpensive pharmaceuticals, or a cheap mortgage, here is a brief history of Spam.
If you ever wondered if the term has any connection to the inexpensive, and mysterious luncheon meat that goes by the same name… it does! Its origins go back to a skit (click here to see the skit) by the hysterical British comedy team, Monty Python.
In the skit, a couple sits in a restaurant wondering what to order. It soon becomes apparent that everything contains Spam, or is completely Spam. Before long the entire restaurant is taken over by patrons (Vikings actually) requesting Spam. So much so that nothing else can be heard but a chorus of “Spam, Spam, Spam…”
When e-mail became a tool of the masses, people soon learned to abuse the system by flooding the email channels with junk mail, so it seemed that it was all that existed in your inbox… like Spam.

Spam continues to be a problem to this day. In spite of filters and care in handing out your email address, Spam still arrives. From where does it come?
The following is a primer on some of the ways your email address gets into the wrong hands.

1. You give it to the wrong people. Someone you thought you could trust is less than scrupulous, and is using your e-mail for purposes other than you intended. You may have registered at a web site thinking you were going to find out how to cure your back pain, and next thing you know, you are getting daily offers on a miracle cure. You were deceived.
2. Your name was sold. This one is all too common. You registered on a web site, or gave your name to a store or organization. Some of these people will then sell your name and address to a list company. In fact, some of the sites at which you register, exist ONLY to get your name. In exchange they offer something of value like an article or “valuable information”. They then offer your name on lists of email addresses.
3. Your name is harvested. You may have registered on a site, signed a guest book, left a comment, or maybe you have a link to an email address from within your own website (ex: Info@mywebsite.com).
Bots, or spiders will crawl the web, visiting sites, the sites those sites link to, and on and on. They eventually find the one with your name.
Now it doesn’t matter that your email address doesn’t appear on the site, it just may be referenced as a link. No matter, the bots will find it, record and use it. Insiduously!
4. Your friends do it! So you are on a site viewing this most entertaining video, and you’d love Susan to see it. How convenient, there is an icon that says “mail to a friend”. All you have to do is enter your email and theirs and they will send Susan a copy. How thoughtful! Now they have two new e-mail addresses. And both fresh and guaranteed to work.
5. You confirm your address. Now you receive offers to view celebrity video antics, and are really enraged. You want to tell these people to cease. You reply to one of the messages telling them exactly how you feel, and you want this stopped. You have achieved two things by doing this. One, you wasted 2 minutes of time you could have used playing Solitaire, and secondly, you have just confirmed to these “people” that your email is still active, and furthermore, you DO read their mail! You just worsened your situation.

6. They guess. When spammers want something badly enough, they work hard. They will just go through a sequence of addresses, and a domain they target, and keep guessing. Well, at least their software does. They methodically try every sequence until the get you. The only defense here, is to create emails long enough, or complex enough, that they don't get to it. Or, create an elongated email by inserting "." in the name, so that it looks something like Sarahk.lastname.city.friendsname.favoritefruit@domain.com. This is long yet easier to remember then a 26 character string.

In the next entry, we’ll discuss remedies and defenses. Take note that nothing is perfect or does the whole job, however there are things you can do to minimize the problem.