SKOPJE, Macedonia, July 23 (UPI) -- Tennessee resident K. C. "Khan" Smith owes the Internet service provider EarthLink $24 million.
According to CNN, last August Smith was slapped with a lawsuit accusing him of violating federal and state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and numerous other state laws. On July 19 -- having failed to appear in court -- the judge ruled against him. Smith is a "spammer".
Brightmail, a vendor of e-mail filters and anti-spam applications warned that close to 5 million spam "attacks" or "bursts" happened last month. Spam has mushroomed 450 percent since June last year.
PC World concurs. Between one-seventh and one-half of all e-mail messages are spam -- unsolicited and intrusive commercial ads, mostly concerned with sex, scams, get rich quick schemes, financial services and products, and health articles of dubious provenance. The messages are sent from spoofed or fake e-mail addresses. Some spammers hack into unsecured servers, mainly in China and South Korea, to relay their missives anonymously.
Spam is an industry. Mass e-mailers maintain lists of e-mail addresses, often "harvested" by spamware bots -- specialized computer applications -- from Web sites. These lists are rented out or sold to marketers who use bulk mail services. They come cheap -- about $100 for 10 million addresses. Bulk mailers provide servers and bandwidth, charging per million messages sent.
As spam recipients become more inured, Internet service providers less tolerant, and both more litigious, spammers multiply their efforts to maintain the same response rate. Spam works. It is not universally unwanted -- which makes it tricky to outlaw. It elicits between 0.1 and 1 percent in positive follow-ups, depending on the message. Many messages now include HTML, JavaScript, and ActiveX coding and thus resemble viruses.
Jupiter Media Matrix predicted last year that the number of spam messages annually received by a typical Internet user is likely to double to 1,400 and spending on legitimate e-mail marketing will reach $9.4 billion by 2006 -- compared to $1 billion in 2001. Forrester Research pegs the marketing spending at $4.8 billion next year.
More than 2.3 billion spam messages are thought to be sent daily, although eMarketer puts the figures a lot lower -- at 76 billion messages this year. By 2006, daily spam output will soar to around 15 billion missives, says Radicati Group. Jupiter projects a more modest 268 billion annual messages by 2005. An average communication costs the spammer 0.00032 cents.
PC World quotes the European Union as pegging the bandwidth costs of spam worldwide at $8-10 billion annually. Other damages include server crashes, time spent purging unwanted messages, lower productivity, aggravation, and increased cost of Internet access.
Inevitably, the spam industry gave rise to an anti-spam industry. According to a Radicati Group report "Anti-virus, anti-spam, and content filtering market trends 2002-2006", anti-spam revenues are projected to exceed $88 million this year -- and more than double by 2006. List blockers, report and complaint generators, advocacy groups, registers of known spammers, and spam filters all proliferate. The Wall Street Journal reported in its June 25 issue about a resurgence of anti-spam startups financed by eager venture capital.
Internet service providers are bent on preventing abuse -- reported by victims -- by expunging the accounts of spammers. But the latter simply switch Internet service providers or sign on with free services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Barriers to entry are getting lower by the day as the costs of hardware, software, and communications plummet.
The use of e-mail and broadband connections by the general population is spreading. Hundreds of thousands of technologically-savvy operators have joined the market in the last two years, as the dot.com bubble burst. Still, Steve Linford of the UK-based Spamhaus.org insists that most spam emanates from about 80 large operators.
Now, according to Jupiter Media, Internet service providers and portals are poised to begin to charge advertisers in a tier-based system, replete with premium services. Writing back in 1998, Bill Gates described a solution also espoused by Esther Dyson, chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"As I first described in my book "The Road Ahead" in 1995, I expect that eventually you'll be paid to read unsolicited e-mail. You'll tell your e-mail program to discard all unsolicited messages that don't offer an amount of money that you'll choose. If you open a paid message and discover it's from a long-lost friend or somebody else who has a legitimate reason to contact you, you'll be able to cancel the payment. Otherwise, you'll be paid for your time."
Subscribers may not appreciate joint ventures between gatekeepers and inbox clutterers. Moreover, dominant Internet service providers, such as AT&T and PSINet have recurrently been accused of knowingly collaborating with spammers. Internet service providers rely on the data traffic that spam generates for their revenues in an ever-harsher business environment.
The Financial Times and others described how WorldCom refuses to ban the sale of spamware over its network, claiming that it does not regulate content. When "pink" (the color of canned spam) contracts came to light, the implicated Internet service providers blame the whole affair on rogue employees.
PC World begs to differ.
"Ronnie Scelson, a self-described spammer who signed such a contract with PSInet, (says) that backbone providers are more than happy to do business with bulk e-mailers. 'I've signed up with the biggest 50 carriers two or three times,' says Scelson. The Louisiana-based spammer claims to send 84 million commercial e-mail messages a day over his three 45-megabyte-per-second DS3 circuits. "If you were getting $40,000 a month for each circuit," Scelson asks, "would you want to shut me down?"
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