February 2003

Lost In A Sea Of Spam? 

By Tom Keating

Being able to directly market to your customers, whether it's via fax, phone calls or e-mail goes right to the heart of our American capitalist society. Unfortunately, the right to market to your customers has been slowly eroding due to a few bad apples.

When marketing via the telephone first began (telemarketing), there was some abuse, which led to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) working with Congress to form rules and guidelines by which telemarketing companies must abide. In addition, state laws were passed to help protect customers from being harassed by unscrupulous telemarketers. Do-not-call lists and do-not-fax lists were established and the telemarketing/teleservices industry became legitimized and flourished without the stigma of being a 'shady' business practice. The growth of the telemarketing or teleservices industry to a multibillion dollar industry is proof that outbound telemarketing does indeed work. 

Unfortunately, with the advent of the Internet and the explosion of e-mail addresses, 'shady' characters looking to make an easy buck have sprung up to sell everything from ink jet cartridges, to human growth hormone, to weight loss gimmicks, free vacations, free porn, debt consolidation, low mortgage rates and, of course, Viagra. You know them as spammers. 

I know them as the most vile, evil creatures that ever walked the face of the earth.
In all seriousness, spammers and their practices pose a serious threat to the legitimate e-mail marketers. I consider a legitimate e-mail marketer to be a company that sends e-mail messages to their customers only, or rents e-mail lists from people that 'opted in' to receiving third-party e-mail offers. They must also maintain a do-not-e-mail list, or an 'opt-out' list, for me to consider them legitimate. Truly strict e-mail marketers use what is called a 'double-opt-in' process, whereby they notify you via e-mail that you have been removed or added to their e-mail marketing list.

My History With E-mail 
When I first started using e-mail nine years ago, I had all my e-mail notifications turned on. Outlook would show me a pop-up window that would say, 'You have received a new e-mail. Do you wish to read it now?' Since I only received an e-mail every 15 minutes, it was no big deal to have this pop-up window, even though it sometimes interrupted my typing in Microsoft Word. Eventually, as I started receiving more e-mail, including spam, I turned off the pop-up window, but left on the sound chime notification and mail envelope icon notification in the system tray. Soon, I was receiving an e-mail every two minutes, and it became too distracting to have Outlook give me any sort of notification that a new e-mail had arrived. I felt liked one of Pavlov's dogs, trained by the sound of the Outlook chime sound to automatically stop whatever it was I was doing and immediately determine what the e-mail was about. After all, it could be from a friend or family member, an important business issue, or a critical IT issue that needed to be addressed immediately. More often than not, the e-mail could have waited. Unfortunately, the damage was done ' I got sidetracked and it took me a few moments to get back into the mind-set of what I had been previously working on.

Due to the distraction of constant e-mail notifications, I eventually turned off all notifications, including the mail envelope icon in the lower-right-hand corner system tray, the flashing of the mouse cursor, and even the e-mail chime sound. It just became too distracting to receive a new e-mail every 120 seconds only to find out the message was an unimportant piece of spam. In addition, I used Outlook's rules to prioritize, sort and move e-mail based on person or keywords. For example, common spam keywords, such as 'mortgage rates,' were easily filtered into my Spam folder. But my manual filtering was no more than 80 percent accurate at catching spam and it seemed a never-ending battle between the spammers and me to constantly update my keyword filtering algorithms.

Spammers often try to equate their practices with the junk mail you receive in your home mailbox. They say, 'Well, people have to deal with throwing away unsolicited junk mail at home and THAT'S perfectly legal, so why can't we send unsolicited e-mail?' This argument, in my opinion, doesn't hold any water. First, junk mail incurs some sort of cost on the junk mail senders. Thus, they can't send a piece of junk mail to every U.S. mailing address ' they'd go bankrupt due to the printing and mailing costs. So they use targeted lists, usually geographic in nature or by some sort of demographic, such as good credit history, or current subscribership to a specific magazine. Because the list is targeted, unlike spammers, junk mail senders don't blanket every mailing address in creation to try and get people to 'bite' on their marketing campaign. I can quickly sort through my junk mail in a minute or less, and it's on my own personal time, not on the corporate dime.

Conversely, e-mail spammers do not incur any cost when they mass e-mail a large database of e-mail addresses. Except for the cost of the Internet connection, sending e-mail has virtually no cost, so they 'blanket' mass e-mail every address they can find. On the other hand, the cost to ISPs is massive, requiring them to add extra network bandwidth and network hardware to handle the load of spam. In fact, several studies estimate that between 20 percent and 40 percent of all ISP network traffic is spam-related.

How would your customers feel about receiving a direct mail piece from you ' with postage due? Of course they wouldn't like it. Another reason spam is so popular is that it shifts the cost from the advertiser to the recipient. Some e-mail users pay for the time they spend downloading e-mail, which means they're paying for an ad they didn't ask for and don't want.

Because sending e-mail is virtually free, spammers can mass-blast every e-mail address they can find. In fact, many spammers use 'spam bots' that search the Internet for the '@' symbol, an indicator of an e-mail address. So if your e-mail address is posted anywhere on the Internet, you can bet that eventually a spam bot will find it. Since I receive anywhere from 65 to 100 spam e-mails a day, I have to scan the subjects, determine if it is spam, then open or delete it accordingly. Then I have to deal with the tricky spammers that use vague or misleading subject lines such as 'hi' or 'your account information,' attempting to entice me into opening and viewing the contents. This is a waste of my time and it has an impact on my productivity. This productivity loss, as a result, also incurs a financial cost to my employer. So those that argue that spam is merely a nuisance and doesn't cost anything are full of'well, spam.

In any case, if you are like me and hate spam, don't despair, there are several filtering software solutions. This month, I tested Sunbelt Software's spam filtering software, appropriately named iHateSpam, which works with Outlook 2000/2002 and Outlook Express version 5 or higher.

Sunbelt Software USA
101 North Garden Ave.
Clearwater, FL 33755
Tel: 888-688-8457
www.sunbeltsoftware.com
Price: $19.95 per license

iHateSpam, I discovered, has an interesting configuration. It features the ability to create 'friends' and 'enemies' lists, which can be simply an e-mail address, or even an entire domain to your enemy or friend list. One of the first things I did was add '@yahoo.com,' '@hotmail.com' and '@aol.com' to my enemies list, since a good portion of my spam comes from these domains. Then, since I have a few friends that use those domains, I used the iHateSpam Wizard to automatically find e-mail addresses in my Inbox, Sent Items and Contacts. It then let me check off which e-mail addresses I wanted added to my friends list. Fortunately, the friends list supercedes the domains I added to my enemies list, which allowed only specific Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL e-mails through unfiltered.

iHateSpam has a 'learning' capability called the 'Learning Network' (See Figure 1) that actually uses the power of all the iHateSpam users to report spam and build new spam rules accordingly. Thus, if you highlight an e-mail and click on the 'Is Spam' button on the Outlook toolbar, the e-mail will be reported to the Learning Network Server (sent by standard Web protocol so there are no firewall problems). The message is then analyzed by Sunbelt's server to see if it matches other similar messages sent in by other users. As more e-mail messages with similar properties or subject matter are sent in to the Learning Network Server, a higher statistical probability is assigned to the messages that they are either genuine spam or legitimate e-mails. Sunbelt claims that a live human operator (not a computer) generates a report on the spam types, and then determines if new spam rules need to be created. When new spam rules are created, they are then propagated to other users through automatic updates to iHateSpam. I should point out that it's a completely optional feature and is not required to successfully use the product.

Figure 1. A support session with chat, Web push and file transfer activity.

In addition to iHateSpam's built-in rules, you can build your own personal rules (Outlook version) which allows you to create custom spam indicators based on over a dozen mail message properties. Personal rules are not overwritten or deleted by the iHateSpam automated rule update service.

If you examine Figure 2, you will see Outlook XP with iHateSpam's special toolbar that includes several buttons, including 'Is Spam,' 'Not Spam,' 'Bounce,' 'Add to Friends,' 'Add to Enemies' and other buttons. Also notice the 'Quarantine: Junk' folder displayed, currently containing 13 spam messages. I was able to scan all 13 subject lines, hit Ctrl-A, then the Del key to quickly delete all the spam in one fell swoop! Processing and deleting spam was never so easy or satisfying!

Other features of iHateSpam include:
' Support of Hotmail with Outlook XP,
' The ability to clean any Outlook e-mail folder (Outlook version),
' The ability to ask iHateSpam to check for junk e-mail in any Outlook e-mail folder you choose. You can also clean old mail based on date ranges,
' Management of threshold levels,
' Use of the thresholds slider bar to adjust the level of unwanted mail messages that are filtered. The higher the threshold level, the more aggressive the program will be in its spam detection, 
' The ability to bounce e-mail, and
' The ability to click a button and have iHateSpam attempt to send a spammer an automated message informing them that your e-mail address 'is not a valid e-mail address.' 

Figure 2. iHateSpam's Quarantine folder displayed.

Over the course of over a month of usage, I counted the number of spam messages that was accurately filtered versus the ones that made it to my inbox. I had 1,533 spam messages moved to the Quarantine/Junk folder. Of those, only three were 'false positives.' Of those three false positives, I simply added them to my friend's list and they were no longer filtered. In addition, I had 10 e-mails that were not identified as spam that made it to my inbox. So that's only 13 mistakes by the software, resulting in an incredible 99 percent accuracy. 

Conclusion
Direct e-mail marketing is a great tool to stay in touch with your customers and offer them specials, promotions or information. But how are the legitimate e-mail marketers going to succeed when their messages get lost in the sea of junk e-mail, which seems to grow exponentially each year? According to research by Cognitiative, Inc. (www.cognitiative.com), one-third of consumers dislike sales-oriented e-mail so much they avoid the vendors that send it. The reason is that sales-oriented spam is 'souring' consumers towards any type of sales-oriented e-mail ' even legitimate e-mail marketing campaigns. I have to wonder'has the explosion of spam, which just about everyone despises, had an impact on other forms of direct marketing, such as outbound telesales? For example, the FTC recently passed legislation to enact a national do-not-call list, although it has been delayed over cost issues. I wonder how much impact spam had on adding more regulation for outbound telesales? (This is another area in which the bad apples are ruining a genuine business opportunity for companies that wish to build relationships with their customers via telephone'see Rich Tehrani's 'High Priority!' in this issue.)

It is likely that the 108th Congress, which has put off anti-spam legislation, will soon begin talking about tough new laws. The reason is that in addition to the volume of spam skyrocketing and clogging e-mail servers, costing American companies billions of dollars a year, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) now says it will support tough anti-spam legislation, which it previously opposed.

'The need to stop the growth of spam from cluttering up consumers' mailboxes must be a priority if we are to preserve the promise of e-mail as the next great marketing channel,' said H. Robert Wientzen, president & CEO of the DMA. 'Without a solution that includes legislation, legitimate marketers who use e-mail to communicate with consumers will continue to suffer at the hands of spammers.' 

It is certainly a balancing act between the right of privacy versus the right of free speech or the right to enact free commerce. I don't see the problem of spam being solved very soon. The Internet offers anonymity, making it just too difficult to track spammers. It also obeys no government boundaries'it crosses not just state borders but international borders and jurisdictions, as well. There have been some states that have passed anti-spam laws and some small victories against major nuisance spammers, but if the sheer volume of spam that is sent every day is taken into consideration, it becomes clear that the spammers are winning.

Until legislation solves the problem for us, I hope more tools such as iHateSpam continue to outsmart and stay one step ahead of the spammers so that e-mail recipients receive only desirable e-mail. In the meantime, I highly recommend you check out iHateSpam.