The evolution of anti-spam technology

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FIGHT BACK AGAINST SPAM
The evolution of anti-spam technology
By Ron Herardian

Unsolicited Commercial email (or UCE or "spam") has been a growing problem for the Internet since the mid 1990s. At that time, the Internet was rapidly becoming commercialized as well as accessible to consumers. Initially perceived merely as a nuisance created by a handful of unethical advertisers, spam currently accounts for the majority of email traffic over the Internet. Spam has a negative impact on the ability of businesses and consumers to benefit from the use of email technology and the Internet, and it poses a serious and growing threat to the reliability, efficiency, and security of corporate electronic messaging systems and the Internet.

Spam not caused by technology
Most of the discussions about spam focus on technology issues. However, the fundamental factors driving the increase in spam are economic. The technology of Internet email is such that the recipient and intermediate service providers pay the vast majority of the cost involved in delivering spam messages.

Analyst firm Ferris Research has estimated that, in 2004, spam cost U.S. companies over $10 billion per year. At the same time, spam represents the least expensive way of advertising to literally millions of businesses and consumers. The cost to spammers of sending millions of email messages over the Internet can be quickly recovered through a small number of sales, thus even if the response rate for spam is extremely low compared with legitimate advertising media, (e.g., 100 sales in response to 10 million email messages), it remains profitable to send spam.

As long as the economics of spam hold true, and as long as it is technologically possible to advertise through spam without being held accountable for the true costs, the volume of spam will certainly continue its increase.

Messaging industry slow to respond
By the late 1990s, spam had become a major problem for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and businesses. ISPs and enterprises were forced to take steps to stop spam from overwhelming their email servers and flooding computer networks.

Although the problem was widely recognized in the messaging industry, there were relatively few anti-spam tools and technologies. The messaging industry, comprising vendors of email infrastructure software and related products, as well as standards bodies, was slow to respond to the spam problem--having initially underestimated the scale and technical complexity of the spam problem.

In particular, standards bodies such as the Electronic Messaging Association (now the OpenGroup Messaging Forum) and the Internet Engineering Task Forces (IETF) failed to effectively address the spam problem, although the IETF did eventually create the Anti-spam Research Group (ASRG) in 2003.