STAYING AFLOAT IN A SEA OF SPAM

By Natalia Pashkowsky
Ms. Pashkowsky, a clerk at Bullwinkel Partners, Ltd., is a recent graduate of Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Jackson, Michigan, and will soon go on for her LLM degree at Chicago’s John Marshall Law School.

Unsolicited junk email (spam) is now more than 80% of all email traffic. One study estimates that deleting junk emails costs almost $22 billion annually in lost productivity. Most people spend about three minutes a day deleting junk emails, which doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but when multiplied by the millions of people with Internet access, it means millions of hours – and dollars - wasted on spam.

It may surprise you to learn that a lot of junk email comes from legitimate businesses – if you consider adult websites “legitimate”. Does anyone ever actually buy anything from unsolicited email ads? Not many, but even if only a tiny fraction of people respond, the spammer gets paid by the “click-through” and can make substantial commissions by sending millions of spams at a time – up to 200 million in the course of a single campaign. Result: The merchant is happy because of the additional business; the spammer is happy because of the commissions.

Are there other kinds of junk email? Yes. In fact, much of it is downright malicious. There are basically two kinds. The first kind is used to collect (“harvest”) email addresses. Spammers will pay big money for lists of currently valid email addresses. Certain malicious junk emails can signal back to their sender if the junk email is read, indicating that your email address is active. That is valuable information for a spammer, resulting in even more spam in your inbox.

The second kind is even more insidious. These junk emails can pass along computer viruses, or links to computer viruses. New viruses (sometimes called “Trojan horses” or just “malware”) can allow the spammer to seize control of the infected and direct it to send even more junk emails. The combination of increasing numbers of novice computer users plus widely available high-speed Internet access is just too much for certain spammers to resist. As a result, the majority of junk emails now spew from innocent home computers caught in the grip of a spammer’s – virtual electronic “zombies” acting for their unseen evil masters.

Why Am I Getting So Much Junk Email? It might be the fault of the unfortunately named January 2004 Can Spam Act. This law actually made junk email legal as long as the mailer complied – or appeared to comply - with certain simple requirements. This law also required bulk emailers to provide a means for opting out of the mailing list, typically by including an “unsubscribe” link. The unintended result is that malicious spammers use the same innocent-appearing links to confirm that the email address is active, resulting in even more spam than before. If spam can’t be stopped, it can at least be managed.

First, every Internet-connected computer should already include an up-to-date firewall and plus anti-virus software.

Second, there are junk email filters available that automatically detect and save spam to a junk email folder, just in case a few innocent emails might be caught by mistake.

Some filtering programs, like Thunderbird (available for free at www.mozilla.org), have junk email filtering built in. Others, like Microsoft’s Outlook Express, accept add-on junk email filters (go to www.cnet.com and search for “junk email filter” or “spam filter”). These filters will not reduce the number of junk emails in your inbox, but will save you the time now wasted in digging through them to find genuine messages.