SPAM

Like most people, I used to just delete all the unsolicited commercial email-- also known as "spam" that finds its way to my in-box.

But now I don't let it go at that, and here's why you shouldn't either if you like having affordable internet access.

Commercial spammers operate on a huge scale, sometimes sending out mailings with as many as half a million addresses "harvested" using special database programs (although some are generated randomly- I recently received one with a list of recipients starting with "a@ziplink.net, b@ziplink.net," etc). Although the sending of spam is not illegal, it is against the service agreements of most ISPs, so spammers hide their return email addresses and sometimes even go so far as to "forge" the headers of an email-- the routing information that acts like an electronic postmark, showing the route it took to reach you-- to make it appear as if the mail originated somewhere else.

The problem is that people change email addresses so often that a good number of these spammograms sent out "bounce"-- are returned to sender because the recipient can't be found.

No big deal, right? So it goes back to where it came from.

Except that for spam with a forged header, it doesn't go back to the spammer, it goes somewhere else-- wherever they wanted it to look like the email was coming from. And because the spammer doesn't have an account at that address, the email can't successfully be delivered there, either.

So who cares. There's lots of dead email floating around.

Well, somebody has to care because of the rules that all internet service providers operate under. Any mail that can't be delivered or sent back falls into a mailbox called "Postmaster." Every domain has such an account. And every piece of mail that is sent to "postmaster" must be read. Whether it's ten messages or ten thousand.

ISPs have to pay people to do this-- and they often have to pay for the maintenance and repairs necessitated by having machines crash under the load of several thousand junk emails dropping into their postmaster accounts.

The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) wants spam treated like junk faxing, a practice made illegal in the early 90s. In many ways spam is more like junk faxing than telemarketing or junk snail mail. The sender assumes all costs for both of those operations: telemarketers don't call collect and junk mail doesn't arrive postage due. Marketers can eat up a lot of bandwidth with massive mailings and shift the cost to the providers-- and by extension, you-- because although ISPs only charge a flat monthly rate, they pay for their access by the bit. The more bits, the higher the price. The spammer gets to send all of those billions of bits on the cheap, and stick your provider with the bill.

How long before the buck gets passed to us?

If you get spam, forward it to uce@ftc.gov. Join CAUCE. Fight spam.