The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Dirty Words “DADDY, DADDY... THAT MAN SAID #$@%!” Gordon Woolf gordon@worsleypress.com |
This isn't really about that offal of the Internet: spam. It is about ordinary messages from ordinary people which aren't getting to their destination because of spam and the activities of administrators and ISP managers trying to stop it.
We would all like to be rid of those messages offering us free access to porn sites ("if you'll just give us your credit card number for safe keeping"!), and the way to get bigger mammary glands or longer organs of another kind.
According to Brightmail http://www.brightmail.com/, one of the firms providing anti-spam services to big business, including some major ISPs, junk e-mail now takes up 38 percent of the average inbox, up from a merely annoying 8 percent a year ago. However, in among that spam, there could be that e-mail that you wanted urgently. It could be held up, or deleted, because the sender used a common word for excrement just as he, or she, does on the phone every day. Or maybe he mentioned a certain drug, which, a computer industry newsletter found caused their newsletter to be rejected by more than 1000 mail servers. (Ask your doctor for the common name of sildenafil citrate).
The event that set me on a trail to find out more about such censorship was an e-mail in a Listserv group for desktop publishers, hosted by a US university, and of which I am a co-owner. The e-mail, from an Australian incidentally, was a tirade of invective about the operating systems produced by a certain Bill Gates and the problems in getting his computer to work. The strange thing is that 99 percent of the invective was apparently acceptable, because what triggered the censoring software was a quite common and hardly blue word. The word? Well "it" was preceded by the sound one makes to keep someone quiet and followed by a three-letter acronym for an ancient form of telegraphic print output. Is that enough of a clue? Perhaps we'll all have to become cryptic crossword addicts.
In this case the mail censoring software installed at a subscriber's ISP sent a message to the Listserv software and sent a copy of that message to the subscriber. The message requested the sender to "Please remove any inappropriate language and send it again." However, the message then went on to state what the offending word was, so the poor subscriber, who had to be protected from such "offensive language" was told just what the language was that they were not being allowed to read.
This may seem like the child who learns a new word and uses it, as in the title of this article, but this is not a joke.
Janet Roberts wrote an article for the Web site "E-zine Tips" recently titled "Forward: The New 'F' Word". It seems that some such software can be triggered by the word "forward".
Programs we are talking about have names such as MailMarshal, SpamKiller, Postal Inspector, and iHateSpam. Used assiduously, they can be very useful and MailMarshal puts up a strong case for filters at its Web site http://www.marshalsoftware.com:
"Employee viewing and trading of pornographic, offensive or otherwise unproductive material has emerged as a key concern of many business managers. Not only are these activities wasteful of time and resources in themselves, they may also involve the employer in legal issues of harassment."
I cannot disagree with that. Equally, I see the usefulness of a program which means that if a company decides that "no employee sends or receives executable files, except for members of the IT department, MailMarshal allows you to make it so".
The program identifies files by the code, not just the file extension, which is a step up on how it used to be done. However it is in the area of content filtering based on text that I am expressing concerns.
What has happened is that the real spammers, realising what these content filters are doing, will avoid those words. So the real spam tends to get through while the innocent e-mail gets stopped. By the time the anti-spam software sees a pattern, the junk e-mailers have moved on, and it is mum's message saying "I have great news!!!" that gets blocked.
The battle continues: Brightmail has around a million dummy e-mail accounts to receive spam so they can see patterns as soon as they develop. They have a matter of minutes to update the spam filters of their clients from when an e-mail gets through their existing filters and lands in any of those addresses. Brightmail may update their clients' filters at a rate of five or six times an hour.
Janet Roberts told of the publisher of an e-mail newsletter called Road Bike Rider who said his newsletter had been rejected as a chain letter. This newsletter requires the double opt-in process: the subscriber has to send an e-mail message or fill in a form to subscribe, and then receives an e-mail which has to be answered including a specific alpha-numeric code, or has to enter that code on a Web site, proving they are the person with that e-mail address.
What terrifying phrase got this publisher into trouble? It was "forward this issue to your cycling friends".
The censoring software stated that it had been banned under a rule to block chain letters which looked for the expression "forward" followed by many or all or friends or anyone or others or people or any word starting with every.
TidBits, a long established and well respected e-mail newsletter that caters mainly for Mac users, but which is also read by many who value its overall insight into the world of computers, has also run into trouble. Writer Adam C Engst states: "The mushrooming volume of spam has caused the value and utility of e-mail to drop significantly for many people already, and the way [in which] overzealous server-side content filtering makes e-mail unreliable stands only to worsen the very problem it's attempting to fix."
I'm mentioning e-mail newsletters because they are legitimate senders of a lot of e-mail, and so see any effects magnified a thousand times. The filters which stop e-mail newsletters being received by people who have asked to receive them are the same filters which will stop Uncle Albert's message or the order from a major client. A publisher of medical books told me that newsletters for that community are having many problems because they mention all kinds of nasty words.
A common response from some users is that losing some legitimate messages is worth the reduction in spam. But is your mail sufficiently unimportant that you don't care if some of it never arrives? Adam comments: "We don't automatically treat infections with amputation".
The ISP I use for my dial-up service (I live outside the current Melb PC service area) automatically adds a "***SPAM***" prefix to doubtful mail. It seems to work fairly well, but has marked one or two messages as spam which most definitely were not. However, it is up to me whether I delete such messages as I scan through them."
Another way that service providers can deal with filtering is to quarantine messages caught by content filters, so users have the opportunity to recover important messages - but you have to find out that a message has been blocked.
The real problem is spam itself, and the Internet community will have to address spam at a fundamental level. There have been numerous proposals, ranging from legislation to modifications to the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) system. Others are trying to find ways to ensure that spam doesn't pay, but even the
Nigerian scam has succeeded in duping some who receive it.
The big men of spam claim (if you can believe anything from a spammer) to be making millions of dollars - but the Wall Street Journal recently interviewed the other end of the scale, a single mum with two kids who sends 60 million e-mails a month. Laura told the newspaper that if she gets 100 responses from every 10 million messages, she will make $200,000 this year in commissions.
The e-mail addresses she buys can be created by suppliers who hurl tens of thousands of common names at e-mail systems to see what sticks. When the attack yields a live address, the spammer adds it to his database. In such ways the spammers may find even legitimate addresses which have never been used.
Geoff Duncan, who runs the TidBits e-mail comments: "Email, often hailed as the Internet's 'killer app,' is in danger of beco ming an unreliable, arbitrarily censored medium - and there's very little we can do about it."
Brightmail estimates that spam increased by 600 percent in 2002. Filtering that works may save money, but filtering that backfires has direct costs. Part of that cost is passed off to the sender, but part stays with the organization doing the filtering, to support users who didn't receive expected e-mail or dealing with remote administrators to figure out what's going wrong.
When a legitimate e-mail is rejected because it contains the words "undress" and "blonde" without any connection between the two, one may want to ask "Does e-mail have a future?"
| The Top Spam Of 2002 What was the top spam of 2002? According to Brightmail the ranking was:
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About the Author
Gordon Woolf, is a Melb PC member who writes and publishes books on publication production, but who also runs an e-mail
newsletter and helps administer a long established e-mail discussion group. He can be contacted at
gordon@worsleypress.com.
Reprinted from the February 2003 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
