The Hindu : National : Turning the tables on junk e-mail

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 13, 2005

National

National

Turning the tables on junk e-mail

By Randall Stross

NEW YORK, FEB. 12. Compare the e-mail system of today with the British General Post Office in 1839, and ours wins. Compare it with the British postal system in 1840, however, and ours loses.

In that year, the British introduced the Penny Black, the first postage stamp. It simplified postage — to a penny — and shifted the cost from the recipient to the sender, who had to prepay. We look back with wonder that it could have ever been otherwise. Recipient pays? Why should the person who had not initiated the transaction be forced to pay for a message with unseen contents? What a perverse system.

Today, however, we meekly assume that the recipient of e-mail must bear the costs. It is nominally free, of course, but it arrives in polluted form. Cleaning out the stuff once it reaches our in-box, or our Internet service provider's, is irritating beyond words, costly even without per-message postage. This muck — Hotmail alone catches about 3.2 billion unsolicited messages a day — is a bane of modern life.

Even the best filters address the problem too late, after this sludge has been discharged without cost to the polluter.

We can now glimpse what had once seemed unattainable: stopping the flow at its very source. The most promising news is that many companies have overcome the fear that they would prompt sanctions if they joined forces to reclaim the control they have lost to spammers.

They belong to an organisation called the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, formed last year. It shares anti-spam techniques and lobbies other e-mail providers to adopt policies that protect the commons. Civic responsibility entails not merely screening incoming mail to protect one's own customers but also screening outgoing mail that could become someone else's problem.

Carl Hutzler, AOL's director of anti-spam operations, has been an energetic campaigner, urging network operators to "cut off the spammer's oxygen supply," as he told an industry gathering. One measure backed by advocates like Mr. Hutzler is already having a positive impact: "Port 25 blocking," which prevents an individual PC from running its own mail server and blasting out unsupervised e-mail on its own.

With the block in place, all outgoing e-mail must go through the service provider's mail server, where high-volume batches of identical mail can be detected easily and cut off.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National