Canning Spam

There's good news and bad about what companies can do to stem the tide of spam.

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I started today with spam. Lots of spam. Just like I do every morning.

Not the famous Hormel product. I'm talking, of course, about the smorgasbord of junk e-mail that cascades into my work and personal inboxes every night.

Today's menu featured all the usual suspects: Ads for beefing up body parts I don't possess. Promises that I can make $2,000 a week stuffing envelopes at home. Offers for cut-rate mortgages, herbal diet plans, nude pictures of Britney Spears. "Urgent & confidential" messages from strangers in faraway lands, pledging to share millions in inherited wealth with me if I just let them borrow my bank account.

And, of course, a half-dozen variations on this theme: "Astuart, End Spam Forever!!!!"

If only it were that easy.

Spam -- unsolicited bulk e-mail, usually selling something -- has been around almost as long as the commercial Internet. But lately it's spreading faster than a bad cold in a kindergarten classroom. "It's a plague, a disease," moans Shel Horowitz, an author, consultant and owner of FrugalMarketing.com in Northhampton, Mass. "A few months ago, I was getting 100 spams a day. Now it's up around 400."

He's certainly not alone. As Internet usage increases, spam is hitting epidemic proportions. It's the fastest-growing form of e-mail, accounting for nearly one in five of the 31 billion messages sent worldwide each day in 2002, says Robert P. Mahowald, senior analyst with IDC, a Framingham, Mass., research company. MessageLabs says the ratio had reached nearly one in three by March 2003; the British e-mail management service predicted that spam could equal or outstrip regular messages within the year.

At some companies, that's already happened. "I average between 70 and 100 pieces of junk e-mail every day," compared with a handful of legitimate messages, says Steven Clark, a public-relations executive with Andover Communications in Fort Lee, N.J. "It's gotten so bad that I now come into the office on Sunday night so I can eliminate the weekend spam."

From a business standpoint, that's spam's biggest sin: It wastes employee time -- about 5 seconds per message, by IDC's estimate. That may sound miniscule, but multiply those seconds by hundreds of messages and dozens of employees, and suddenly junk e-mail qualifies as a major productivity drain. Spam also strains networks, takes up storage space, keeps tech teams busy, and potentially spreads computer viruses. And who knows how many pieces of legitimate mail get deleted as frustrated users try to clear their inboxes? Overall, according to Ferris Research in San Francisco, spam will cost businesses more than $10 billion this year.

It's become so problematic that, in 2003 alone, Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a conference on the matter and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission scheduled a three-day Spam Forum. More than 25 states have enacted or are considering spam-related laws (most notably, in April 2003, Virginia made it a felony to send bulk e-mails using deceptive practices, such as using phony return e-mail addresses). However, David E. Sorkin, a professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago who tracks such efforts has called most legislation to date too narrow or toothless to do much good. (So far, federal anti-spam legislation has failed, due largely to free-speech concerns. Critics also say one country's laws won't matter much in a global medium. It's hard to imagine anonymous spammers in, for instance, the Philippines or Malaysia losing sleep over violating a U.S. spam ban.)

Obvious question: If everybody hates spam so much, why do would-be sellers send it? Because it's cheap. And it works. For $100 to $200, entrepreneurs can buy a CD with millions of e-mail addresses. Or they can use a "bot," or software robot, that harvests addresses from all over the Web. Or they can hang out in chat rooms and collect addresses themselves. Or they can pay a marketing service to send spam for them. In most cases, they need just a few sales to recoup their costs.

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