Published January 2004

E-mail being devalued
in deluge of spam

Whether it’s at the water cooler, in the boardroom or in the halls of Congress, just about everybody is fed up with spam — a digital plague that is flooding inboxes, misusing bandwidth and often offending now wary recipients with its content.

“I don’t go to a town-hall meeting, I don’t meet a friend who doesn’t say, ‘Take care of that spam,’” U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Montana, was quoted as saying in October, after an anti-spam bill he helped sponsor was first approved by the Senate.

By early December, after much back and forth, both the U.S. House and Senate had approved the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (Can-Spam), which the president then signed into law.

The legislation, while not banning all unsolicited commercial e-mail, does nix the use of false return addresses and require pornographic e-mail to be clearly labeled. It also enables the Federal Trade Commission to set up a “do not spam” registry. Violators of the law face possible jail time and big-dollar fines.

Unfortunately, the bill overrides a number of state anti-spam laws, some of which have more bite to battle spam, now estimated to make up at least half of all e-mail sent, according to Internet industry estimates.

This year alone, spam is projected to cost U.S. businesses more than $10 billion in lost productivity, clogged bandwidth and additional anti-spam resources.

But spam is not only a drain on a company’s bottom line, it also is jeopardizing e-mail’s viability as a communication tool.

According to a recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

• 70 percent of those surveyed said spam has made being online unpleasant and annoying;
• 25 percent said the increasing volume of spam has reduced their overall use of e-mail, with more than half of that group reducing their e-mail use drastically;
• 52 percent said spam has made them less trusting of e-mail.

“For many, this loss of trust translates into a factor of reliability, a key element in any communications system,” according to the report, “Spam: How it is Hurting E-mail and Degrading Life on the Internet.”

The reliability factor, it seems, is being called into question by e-mail users who fear that their anti-spam software may actually be filtering out important messages (30 percent); their outgoing e-mails may be blocked by the recipient’s filter (23 percent); or they might accidentally delete an important e-mail, mistaking it for spam (29 percent).

So what’s a person to do? Not use filters and suffer the deluge? Use filters and be left to wonder? Use software equipped with a “quarantine” mechanism so that you can check possible spam, thus negating the purpose of getting anti-spam software in the first place?

While anti-spam legislation is a step in the right direction, e-mail users can do their part to end spam by simply not responding to those unsolicited, smarmy sales pitches, whether it’s for a miracle weight-loss supplement or offers to “be your own boss.”

As the Pew report notes, “For all the good intentions of most, there are enough e-mail users who respond to offers in unsolicited e-mail to sustain spam as a viable, lucrative endeavor.”

Of course, spammers may end up putting themselves out of business. If 25 percent of e-mail users are now curbing their online use thanks to spam, just imagine how many will pull off the Information Superhighway by 2007, when, according to Jupiter Research, the average e-mail user can expect to receive 3,900 unwanted e-mail messages a day.

I’m no marketing guru, but even I know that it’s hard to hawk goods when you don’t have prospects — no matter how cheap that “generic Viagra” is.

— Kimberly Hilden, SCBJ Assistant Editor

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