Spam Filtering: February 2006 Archives

Unless you have a real problem! One of our clients was sent over 53 thousand spams today. Puts it into perspective, doesn't it?

I really like FeedBurner. I think it's a really cool service and have been delighted with each and every new feature that they've added. I have no idea how many users they currently have, but the vast majority of blogs that I read on a regular basis seem to be using the service. Of course they may feel that they need to increase market share, but there are good ways to do that and there are bad ways to do that. Spamming is not the way to do it. Spam, UBE, UCE - call it what you like, is a serious issue. If the likes of Yahoo and AOL are considering taking action that would potentially block "free" access to their users and in so doing change the very nature of email, you may begin to get an idea of how serious spam is. If I take a quick look at some of our email statistics, for one part of our network only, the level of spam hitting the network can be quite worrying... We rejected over 1.5 million emails last month alone !! (these would have been primarily dictionary attacks with no valid recipient) So let's look at what seems to have happened with FeedBurner... The Blog Herald reports that they received an email from Feedburner as follows:

To Whom It May Concern: I noticed that you are currently running some RSS feeds on your site. I am writing to suggest that you run those feeds through FeedBurner.com. We currently manage over 190,000 feeds for over 120,000 publishers; through FeedBurner, publishers get invaluable insight into their feed usage: how many subscribers they have, which items their subscribers are reading, and which items generate the most click-throughs. Our core service is free, though we do have some premium services if you’re interested in more detailed analytics. If you decide to run your feeds through us you will not only gain a more friendly “subscribe” page (see my feed at feeds.feedburner.com/thewannabevc) but you will also gain access to many other helpful additions that will add functionality to your feed and make your feed more accessible. In addition to feed management services, we also offer feed monetization – which gives publishers the ability to advertise in their feeds. With our growing list of publishers across a broad range of advertising channels, we have a number of very interesting ad campaigns running that might be appropriate for your feeds. If you need any help setting up your feeds at feedburner.com or if you have any questions please feel free to ping me. Take care and I look forward to working with you in the future. —— Eric Olson Associate - Business Development FeedBurner - http://www.feedburner.com xxxx@feedburner.com AIM/Skype: xxxx

Problems this raises:

• It was unsolicited
• It's obviously bulk
• There's no indication of where they got the email address from
• There's no way of unsubcribing
• It's pushing a commercial service

It's a clear case of spam. Or is it? Others would like to argue that it is merely a case of "direct marketing" and that spam can simply be summed up as:

Spam is the rubbish about unwanted pharmaceuticals, knock-off software and disgusting websites. An unsolicited email about a service in my sphere of interest is legitimate direct marketing.

The first sentence would echo most people's perception of spam ie. that is only about certain topics, but even there the author is being extremely subjective, as he refers to "disgusting" websites. Disgusting according to whom? Some people actually enjoy them, so it's all a matter of personal taste and views, or, to put it more succintly, it's subjective. The second sentence is highly subjective and even contradictory. If it's unsolicited and sent in bulk, then it is, by definition, UBE (unsolicited bulk email), which is another name for spam. Some of his other points are amusing:

Lots of bloggers and every day people wouldn't call it email spam. They would think it interesting.

Yes, they might call one email interesting, but when you are getting hundreds of them per day and your network resources are being eaten up by this junk I'm fairly sure the "interest" swiftly wanes. The scary thing is that Feedburner executives can't see anything wrong with what they've done. Sure, they're vaguely apologetic about it, but what makes me think that they thought they'd simply get away with it? Have a look at some of their comments here, here and here Of course they should be more worried about their registrar taking action against them. In recent weeks the number of ICANN registrars who have decided to implement strict anti-spam terms of service has grown and spammers do run the risk of finding their domains deactivated.

According to an in the New York Times AOL and other ISPs are considering a plan to charge for email sent to their networks. While unpaid mail will still be accepted it will have to "run the gauntlet" of the spam filters etc.,:

AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links. As is the case now, mail arriving from addresses that users have added to their AOL address books will not be treated as spam.

While I can appreciate AOL and Yahoo's perspective on this, I can also see this having a lot of undesirable side-effects. Spam filtering is not an easy thing to do without upsetting some people at least some of the time. It's a pity that solutions such as hash cash aren't more widely implemented, as they might help avoid this type of scenario. You can read about the system in detail on their FAQ, but a basic summary is this:

Hash cash is payment in burnt CPU cycles by calculating n-bit partial hash collisions on chosen texts. The idea of using partial hashes is that they can be made arbitrarily expensive to compute (by choosing the desired number of bits of collision), and yet can be verified instantly. This can be used as the basis for an ecash system measured in burnt CPU cycles. Such cash systems can be used to throttle systematic abuses of un-metered internet resources.

(taken from here) Or in plain English.. You basically "pay" for each email you send as your computer has to work a little harder to send each email. The idea being that if you are willing to put in the effort of doing this then your mail *should* be legitimate. So, could this hail the end of email as we know it? Or will it merely mean that AOL et al will lose clients?