6 ways to fight spam
By Pat Curry • Bankrate.com

When Dave Strickler was doing research to start MailWise, a Web-based anti-spam and anti-viral filter, he spent a Sunday afternoon creating a domain name for the company and a user name and e-mail address for himself. Within 36 hours, he had spam in his newly created mailbox.

What once seemed a minor inconvenience has become a nightmare for most e-mail users. At the beginning of 2003, technology analysts found that about 30 percent of all incoming e-mail was spam. By December, that figure had risen to 50 percent, says Chris Williams, a research analyst for San Francisco-based Ferris Research, a market and technology research firm focused on e-mail and collaboration issues. Within a year, that number may reach nine out of 10.

Spared some spam
And yet, consumers don't see a fraction of the spam that's sent out. The Pew Internet and American Life Project, a national research report released in October, said that the two major Internet Service Providers, America Online and MSN, both block more than 2.7 billion spam messages a day from reaching their subscribers. That's 67 spam e-mails per mailbox per day, or about 80 percent of the incoming messages. With that kind of volume, it's no wonder the Pew project declared that "spam is beginning to undermine the integrity of e-mail and to degrade the online experience."

The flood has gotten so severe that Congress passed a law designed to stem the tide, the so-called "can spam" legislation. It outlaws some of the techniques used by spammers, and encourages the Federal Trade Commission to create a do-not-spam list.

However, the law supplants anti-spam laws already passed by some states. Plus some consumer advocates say a do-not-spam list would be a gold mine for spammers and wouldn't touch those who operate overseas.

"If they can't collect taxes from offshore gaming, they can't stop spam from China," says Doug Peckover, president of Dallas-based Privacy Inc.

A pernicious problem
A problem both in terms of sheer volume and in the types of material to which it can expose unsuspecting users, spam has been identified as one of the top issues facing the technology community.

"It's a huge problem and it will get a whole lot worse because the technology to send spam is getting better and cheaper," says Peckover. "For e-mail marketing to be profitable, the response rate needs to be about one in 100,000. It will probably go to one in a million."

A study released in July of 2003 reported that spam costs businesses $874 per employee per year in lost productivity, mainly time spent cleaning out their e-mail every day. For consumers, it means an obliteration of the convenience that is the hallmark of e-mail.

"I was talking to a colleague of mine who gets 2,000 messages a day," Peckover says. "That means he can't use his e-mail anymore."

Peckover says that any strategy for dealing with spam and getting off e-mail lists needs to start with the assumption that no one can help you.

There are some tactics that e-mail users can use, and that the Pew Project says many people are already putting into place. Here are six you can try:

Protect your address
Be choosy about handing out your e-mail address. A $50 e-mail harvesting program is one of the primary tools in a spammer's business. Designed to crawl through chat rooms, Usenet groups and Web sites, including company directories, it looks for the ubiquitous @ symbol that denotes an e-mail address. Almost 70 percent of the e-mail users surveyed by the Pew Project say they avoid putting their addresses on the Internet for just that reason. If your ISP has a member directory, opt out of it.