Want some history?

I was doing some research today for an article I’m working on. The research led me to a San Francisco Law Review article from 2001 written by David E. Sorkin. Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Electronic Mail (.pdf link). The text itself is a little outdated, although not as much as I expected. There’s quite a good discussion of various ways to control spam, most of which are still true and even relevant.

From a historical perspective, the footnotes are the real meat of the document. Professor Sorkin discusses many different cases that together establish the rights of ISPs to filter mail, some of which I wasn’t aware of. He also includes links to then-current news articles about filtering and spam. He also mentions different websites and articles written by colleagues and friends from ‘back in the day’ discussing spam on a more theoretical level.
CNET articles on spam and filtering was heavily referenced by Professor Sorkin. One describes the first Yahoo spam folder. Some things never change, such as Yahoo representatives refusing to discuss how their system works. There were other articles discussing Hotmail deploying the MAPS RBL (now a part of Trend Micro) and then adding additional filters into the mix a few weeks later.
We were all a little naive back then. We thought the volumes of email and spam were out of control. One article investigated the effectiveness of filters at Yahoo and Hotmail, and quoted a user who said the filters were working well.

“It’s really awesome because I get maybe 20 emails a day, and [it’s] mostly junk mail,” said longtime Yahoo Mail user Daniel Nikaiyn. “It’s saved me a lot of time splitting up junk mail and my email. Now I don’t have to sift through them.”

I think I got 20 emails yesterday just trying to register at one new site and do the password reset dance with another.
In addition to the news articles, I saw a bunch of documents and websites I’d nearly forgotten about. There were a group of people, and I include myself among them, that spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to fix spam. When it was 20 emails in my inbox it did seem somewhat silly. Yes, I can delete them. But the bigger issue was the lack of external economic constraints on the amount of mail senders could send. Sure, that day was 20 emails, but there was nothing stopping it being 100 in 6 months and 500 6 months after that.
In fact when I gave up the email address I was using in the late 90s there were days it was receiving hundreds of spams a month, and that was behind commercial grade filters run by my ISP which caught most botnet and snowshoeing spam. And that was just last year, when the overall volume of spam traffic had dropped from over 95% of email traffic down to under 85%.
The whole document is long, but Professor Sorkin did get one thing right.

Coordination of technical and legal mechanisms seems to be the most promising approach to the spam problem. The first step must be to agree upon the ultimate objective: it is quite easy to declare “get rid of spam,” but the definition of spam is sufficiently controversial that this first step may be the most difficult. Technical and legal measures can then be used in a complementary fashion—for example, technical measures can be designed so that one must break the law (or subject oneself to liability) in order to circumvent them, while those who evade or ignore legal controls could be subjected to blackholing and other technical responses.
Yet it is probably unrealistic to expect that the consensus required for such coordination can be achieved. More likely, the technical arms race between spammers and anti-spammers will escalate, and more and more innocent bystanders will be caught in the crossfire. States and countries will continue enacting an increasingly diverse set of spam-related statutes, and traditional legal theories will be stretched and distorted even further in efforts to address spam and other forms of “network abuse.” The news is not all bad; there have been advances in collaborative filtering by companies such as Brightmail, and some recent legislation seems to incorporate at least a rough comprehension of the underlying technology. Nonetheless, a coordinated solution to the problem of spam remains elusive at best. (footnotes removed)

Spam affects endusers less now than it did in in 2002 when the article was written. I don’t think Professor Sorkin envisioned a multi-billion dollar industry spam filter industry, but that is a major reason our inboxes are still useable. I don’t think the laws have necessarily caught up. In fact, my research this afternoon was started as I was thinking about how CAN SPAM is antiquated and doesn’t provide sufficient tools to effectively address spam as it is now. Despite how far we’ve come and how much has changed, spam is still here and will likely be here for the foreseeable future.

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Permission and B2B spam

Two of the very first posts I wrote on the blog were about permission (part 1, part 2). Re-reading those posts is interesting. Experience has taught me that recipients are much more forgiving of implicit opt-in than that post implies.
The chance in recipient expectations doesn’t mean, however, that permission isn’t important or required. In fact, The Verge reported on a chatbot that will waste the time of spammers. Users who are fed up with spam can forward their message to Re:Scam and bots will answer the mail.
I cannot tell you how tempted I am to forward all those “Hey, just give me 10 minutes of your time…” emails I get from B2B spammers. I know, those are actually bots, but there is lovely symmetry in bots bothering one another and leaving us humans out of it.

Speaking of those annoying emails, I tweeted about one (with horrible English…) last week. I tagged the company in question and they asked for an example. After I sent it, they did nothing, and I continued to get mail. Because of course I did.
These types of messages are exactly why permission is so critical for controlling spam. Way more companies can buy my email address and add me to their spam automation software than I can opt-out of in any reasonable time frame. My inbox, particularly my business inbox, is where I do business. It’s where I talk with clients, potential clients, customers and, yes, even vendors. But every unsolicited email wastes my time.
It’s not even that the mail is simply unwanted. I get mail I don’t want regularly. Collecting white papers for my library, RSVPing to events, joining webinars all result in me getting added to companies’ mailing lists. That’s fair, I gave them an email address I’ll unsubscribe.
The B2B companies who buy my address are different. They’re spamming and they understand that. The vendors who sell the automation filters tell their customers how to avoid spam filters. Spammers are told to use different domains for the unsolicited mail and their opt-in mail to avoid blocking. The software plugs into Google and G Suite account because very few companies will block Google IPs.
I’ve had many of these companies attempt to pay me to fix their delivery problems. But, in this case there’s nothing to fix. Yes, your mail is being blocked. No, I can’t help. There is nothing I can say to a filtering company or ISP or company to make them list that block. The mail is unwanted and it’s unsolicited.
The way to get mail unblocked is to demonstrate the mail is wanted. If you can’t do that, well, the filters are working as intended.
 

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It's not fair

In the delivery space, stuff comes in cycles. We’re currently in a cycle where people are unhappy with spam filters. There are two reasons they’re unhappy: false positives and false negatives.
False positives are emails that the user doesn’t think is spam but goes into the bulk folder anyway.
Fales negatives are emails that the user does thing is spam but is delivered to the inbox.
I’ve sat on multiple calls over the course of my career, with clients and potential clients, where the question I cannot answer comes up. “Why do I still get spam?”
I have a lot of thoughts about this question and what it means for a discussion, how it should be answered and what the next steps are. But it’s important to understand that I, and most of my deliverability colleagues, hate this question. Yet we get it all the time. ISPs get it, too.
A big part of the answer is because spammers spend inordinate amounts of time and money trying to figure out how to break filters. In fact, back in 2006 the FTC fined a company almost a million dollars for using deceptive techniques to try and get into filters. One of the things this company did would be to have folks manually create emails to test filters. Once they found a piece of text that would get into the inbox, they’d spam until the filters caught up. Then, they’d start testing content again to see what would get past the filters. Repeat.
This wasn’t some fly by night company. They had beautiful offices in San Francisco with conference rooms overlooking Treasure Island. They were profitable. They were spammers. Of course, not long after the FTC fined them, they filed bankruptcy and disappeared.
Other spammers create and cultivate vast networks of IP addresses and domains to be used in snowshoeing operations. Still other spammers create criminal acts to hijack reputation of legitimate senders to make it to the inbox.
Why do you still get spam? That’s a bit like asking why people speed or run red lights. You still get spam because spammers invest a lot of money and time into sending you spam. They’re OK with only a small percentage of emails getting through filters, they’ll just make it up in volume.
Spam still exists because spammers still exist.
 

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4 things spammers do legitimate marketers don't

I’ve never met a spammer that claims to be a spammer. Most that I’ve met claim to be legitimate marketers (or high volume email deployers). But there are things spammers do that I never expect to see a legitimate marketer doing.
I’ve written about these things throughout the blog (tag: TWSD), but it’s probably time to actually pull them together into a single post.

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