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Are We Losing the War Against Spam? NewsMax.comEven with gatekeepers putting up fences and filters and Congress busy designing legislation, the war against the so-called Internet “spammers” is still not going well, says a report in the New York Times.
According to the report, efforts to tune out spam has done little more than inconvenience the mass e-mailers that send their messages to millions at a clip. "There is no silver bullet," said Lisa Pollock of Yahoo. "There will always be people who can find a way to get around whatever you have in place."
For instance, the spam police tried identifying phrases and other patterns that occur in spam, but spammers learned to vary their messages by adding random words or characters to fool the filtering systems.
Brightmail, which makes spam-filtering software for networks, told the Times that 45 percent of the e-mail it now sees is junk, up from 16 percent in January 2002.
For its part, America Online says the amount of spam aimed at its 35 million customers has doubled since the beginning of this year and now approaches two billion messages a day -- more than 70 percent of the total its users receive.
However, things are getting harder as more senders of mass e-mail face not only filters but legal action as well. America Online and the Federal Trade Commission have filed suit against e-mailers that they say are illicit spammers – spammers that have no permission from the addressees to send their messages.
Meanwhile, legislation in the Senate would make many deceptive e-mail practices illegal. It would require that commercial e-mail messages identify the true sender, have an accurate subject line and offer recipients an easy way to remove their names from marketing lists. The laws would be backed up with fines for violators.
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