Spam: It's More Than Just An Annoyance
by Sherry Hilley
|
Industry experts define “spam” as unsolicited commercial bulk e-mail – in other words, advertisements that marketers blindly send to as many e-mail addresses as possible. Some definitions also include other types of unsolicited messages, such as chain letters, urban legends, jokes and multimedia files. Essentially, spam is any e-mail that you didn’t ask for and didn’t want to receive.
Spam, a minor nuisance just a couple of years ago, has proliferated to the point where it now places a tremendous strain on computer network resources and significantly affects employee productivity. It is estimated that nearly 40 percent of all Internet e-mail is unsolicited and unwanted.
To put the problem of unwanted e-mail into perspective, it is helpful to compare it to “junk” mail delivered through the nation’s postal system. The U.S. Postal Service’s Annual Report for 2002 estimates that roughly 270 million pieces of unsolicited junk mail are delivered each day, or almost 100 billion pieces per year. However, as bothersome as postal junk mail can be, the financial burden is mostly on the sender, since there is a cost with producing and sending each piece of postal mail. Junk or spam e-mail, on the other hand, is exceptionally less expensive for the sender. To send a million pieces of postal mail at the bulk rate would cost the sender $250,000. Meanwhile, the sender of unsolicited/spam bulk e-mails can send hundreds of thousands of messages per hour, using a 28.8-bits-per-second dialup Internet connection and a PC, with the only cost being $10 to $20 per month for Internet service. The vast cost of spam e-mail is being borne by its recipients in lost productivity, network efficiency and data storage space.
|
|
Spam Research and Associated Cost
A San Francisco-based market research company, Ferris Research, has estimated that unwanted commercial e-mail cost U.S. organizations more than $10 billion in 2002. Ferris computed the cost of spam by calculating its effects in three areas: loss of worker productivity; consumptions of bandwidth and other technical resources; and use of technical support time. The company found that productivity loss accounted for 40 percent of the drain, at a cost of $10 per e-mail user per month. At $120 per employee annually, this represents a significant cost to any organization.
Jupiter Research, which tracks Internet activity, claims the average e-mail user received 2,200 spam messages over the past year.
Brightmail, an anti-spam software maker, anticipates that spam will account for 40 percent of electronic mail traffic in 2003. This is an increase of 32 percent over the 8 percent that Brightmail estimated for 2001.
Types of Spam
Brightmail’s Probe Network has identified e-mail spam received by organizations during May 2003 in the following categories:
Products (25 percent) – attacks offering or advertising general goods and services.
Adult (19 percent) – attacks containing or referring to products or services intended for persons above the age of 18, often offensive and inappropriate.
Financial (17 percent) – attacks that contain references or offers related to money.
Health (11 percent) – attacks offering or advertising health-related products and services.
Scams (8 percent) – attacks recognized as fraudulent.
Leisure (8 percent) – attacks offering or advertising prizes, awards or discounted leisure activities.
Internet (7 percent) – attacks specifically offering or advertising Internet or computer-related goods and services.
Other (3 percent) – attacks not pertaining to any other category.
Spiritual (2 percent) – attacks with information pertaining to religious or spiritual evangelization and/or services.
Many of these types of spam contained large files, chain letters, jokes, and offensive and commercial solicitations that were unsolicited and unwanted.
|
|
Stopping Spam
There is no magic formula for stopping spam, but a lot of organizations are trying to find one. As the amount of spam grows, so does the number of products to identify and block it. Currently there are more than 30 vendors selling anti-spam products to assist with reducing the amount of spam received at the server and desktop levels. Vendors of the anti-spam products use sophisticated techniques to filter the spam from legitimate e-mail. Some offer individual desktop or mail server anti-spam software. Others sell hardware and software products that block spam before it reaches your Internet service provider (ISP). Still others run services that block spam before it hits. Inherent in anti-spam software is the fact that some e-mail will be identified as spam when it is actually legitimate. Therefore, the software needs to be flexible in reducing these false identifiers by allowing the users to redefine the spam rules, allowing valid e-mails to be redirected and not stopped in the future.
Even with these sophisticated techniques, it is essential to continually refine the filtering process and stay current with vendor updates, because spammers don’t have to follow any rules. They disguise their names and e-mail addresses, hide messages behind images, and misspell words to fool the spam tools. And the frustration of spam goes even further than an individual’s e-mail inbox. Massive volumes of e-mail can jam an organization’s network, slowing access to the Internet and wasting precious storage space on servers and workstations.
The Florida League of Cities purchased and implemented anti-spam filtering software on its internal mail server in June 2002. During the first month of use, we received a total of 77,212 e-mails and blocked 55,622 as spam-related, which is a 1-to-2.5 ratio. For May 2003, we received a total of 721,636 e-mails and blocked 681,356 as spam-related, which is a 1-to-16.9 ratio. This equates to 94 percent of all e-mails received being identified as spam and stopped from being delivered to employees’ e-mail boxes. From the implementation in June 2002 to May 2003, you can see the significant increase in receiving spam e-mail during the last year. With a small investment in the anti-spam software and technical support, the League has been able to maintain e-mail productivity rather than losing network efficiency and data storage to spam e-mails.
|
|
|
|
