washingtonpost.com
3 E-Mail Providers Join Spam Fight
AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo Seek Ways to Curtail Unwanted Solicitations
By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 28, 2003; Page A02
Three of the nation's largest e-mail account providers, normally bitter rivals, today are to announce a joint assault on spam, vowing to collaboratively hunt down unsavory e-mailers and explore industry standards that would curtail the ability to create bulk electronic mailings.
Representatives of America Online, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. stressed that their initiative against unsolicited e-mail is a first step in what they hope will be a broader industry effort. The initiative, however, lacked specific legislative or technical remedies.
Such an alliance is rare in the competitive world of consumer technology and is testimony to the devastating effect spam has on digital communications. The volume of spam has mushroomed in the past two years, now accounting for an estimated 40 percent of all e-mail traffic and $8 billion to $10 billion in costs to business a year.
"We're putting spammers on notice that the industry will collaborate to drive the bad guys out of business," said Brian Arbogast, a Microsoft vice president in charge of the MSN network.
Nicholas J. Graham, an AOL vice president and spokesman, said the companies were "driven to this point by our members," and that "we recognize spam is out of control." Collectively, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have more than 200 million e-mail account holders, both subscription-paying and free.
Those numbers have made each of the company's services prime targets of spammers. The easy creation of e-mail accounts that are often free allow bulk e-mailers to spam using AOL, Microsoft or Yahoo accounts. Computer programs enable spammers to randomly generate millions of e-mail addresses of the companies' members, many of which match existing account holders.
With the Federal Trade Commission holding a three-day forum on spam this week in Washington, the companies got the jump by promising to make it harder for spammers to use their systems to send unsolicited e-mail.
The companies want the industry to examine technical means for digitially marking e-mail so that it would be identified more easily by users and spam filters. The approved e-mail would have to conform to certain criteria, for example, such as working links to unsubscribe from a mail list, accurate information from the sender and subject lines that accurately reflect the content of the message.
The companies also want to work together to identify networks that are open to being commandeered by spammers, which enable spammers to hide the true originating Internet address of the spam and make it difficult to track down the senders.
On the legal and enforcement side, the companies said they intend to share more complaint data, building evidence files that can be given to assist state and federal prosecutors in cracking down on e-mailers that violate laws prohibiting fraudulent subject lines, originating addresses and other tactics used by spammers.
Many of these techniques already are widely used by anti-spam activists, who have posted large databases of information about alleged spammers that are used by many network operators as blacklists. In general, mail from Internet addresses on the lists are automatically blocked, causing the spammers to create new ones in an endless game of digital cat and mouse.
Executives of AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo said they would welcome participation by spam-tracking groups in helping to formulate strategies, but how those groups would react is not known.
Anti-spam activists have considered the companies as part of the problem, not only for the ease with which spammers have used their systems, but for the firms' own marketing practices. The activists argue that there is no distinction between e-mail from legitimate marketers and from spammers who peddle sexually explicit material, fad diets, get-rich-quick schemes and products for body enhancements.
In this view, marketers should never be allowed to send commercial e-mail unless potential customers have first requested the mail. This opt-in notion contrasts with general industry practice, including AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo, in which users receive marketing mail from their service provider and affiliates unless they specifically opt out.
The escalation of the spam problem and the fight against it also is generating activity on Capitol Hill, where several bills have been introduced or are soon to be proposed. The scope of the bills vary: stricter criminal penalties for deceptive marketing; creating a national do-not-e-mail list; and requiring that the letters ADV, for advertisement, be put in the subject line of all commercial messages.
A bill to be introduced this week, for example, would propose a bounty for anyone who tracks down a spammer.
The executives declined to say which of the three companies first broached the notion of the alliance, which has been the subject of intense negotiation over the past several weeks. Geoff Ralston, a Yahoo vice president, said the purpose of the alliance is not to formulate or get behind a single piece of legislation.