Spam? No thanks, we're full

By Janet Kornblum
USA Today

FREE mortgage quotes! Cheap printer cartridges! Free passes to thousands of XXX sites! URGENT & CONFIDENTIAL!

If you think you're getting more spam than ever, you're right. Spam — junk e-mail — has dramatically increased in the past year, according to recent studies.

"It's an annoying, unwanted intrusion on consumers' lives," said Brian Huseman, a staff attorney with the Federal Trade Commission, the government agency that deals with consumer protection and online marketing. "The problem is growing."

Experts attribute the rise to several factors, including the most obvious: More people are online. Sixty-one percent of U.S. adults — 116 million — and 40 million to 45 million children are online, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And 94 percent of them use e-mail.

And the entry costs of e-mail soliciting are few. For some, getting into spam simply means having a home computer, Internet connection and a little knowledge they can pick up on the Net. They also can buy cheap CDs with millions of e-mail addresses, or just pay someone else to spam for them — about $25 for a million e-mail addresses.

"It just takes a handful of people to purchase the products to make them profitable," said Jared Blank, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research. "The true problem is that spam is effective."

Internet service providers, government officials and others are fighting back with a variety of countermeasures, including lawsuits, new legislation, and software that filters e-mail and separates out spam before it reaches your inbox.

Marketers especially target America Online, Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN Hotmail, the three largest e-mail providers.

More than half of the Internet e-mail sent to America Online's 35 million members is spam, according to AOL, but much of it is blocked before ever getting to anyone's inbox.

In October, AOL upgraded its system with software that allows members to report spam when they get it by simply clicking a button. Yahoo! and Microsoft offer similar programs. Before October, AOL was getting reports of about 200,000 pieces of spam a day. Now users report as many as 2 million pieces daily.

Providers are giving customers more power to control who sends them e-mail; they also can put spammers on a blacklist. Most providers use some sort of blocking list designed to reject mail coming from known spammers.

Companies also are pushing behind the scenes for legal solutions. Twenty-six states have passed some form of anti-spam legislation, said David Sorkin, a law professor with the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. "There's only one or two (laws) that are at all strong — (in) Delaware and Ohio."

Tips for avoiding spam in your inbox

E-mail users are getting smarter about fighting spam. Some tips to keep your inbox from getting flooded by junk mail:

• Try to keep your e-mail address private. Junk e-mailers, like postal junk mailers, collect addresses that they then package and sell. One way to collect them is to harvest them from the Web, using software that recognizes e-mail addresses and copies them to a list.
• Before giving out your e-mail address to a company, either online or off, make sure the company is legitimate and will not sell or share your e-mail address.
• If you spend time in chat rooms or post on message boards, use an e-mail address that you create specifically for that purpose — and expect it to be overrun with spam.
• Don't reply to spam. If it is truly spam and from a shady operator, responding signals an active e-mail address. If the company sending it is legitimate, you can ask to be removed from its mailing list.
• Report spam to your provider. Virtually every Internet service provider has that option. And the larger the provider, the easier they make it.
• Set up your e-mail inbox so it rejects mail from correspondents you don't know.
• For more tips on how to avoid spam, see the Federal Trade Commission's site, www.ftc.gov/spam.