Spam has gotten so bad that it now threatens the very viability of e-mail. For many of us the signal-to-noise ratio of legitimate messages to junk has soared to a ridiculous level. What was once the Net's biggest attraction is quickly turning into a monstrous time waster.
One morning in November, despite basic spam protection from Earthlink, my ISP, I received more than 675 junk e-mails in less than one hour. I watched the spam pile up in a helpless state of disbelief. An escalating problem was now out of control.
Being an individual user with my own domain, I didn't have the same options as large corporate users who can protect their networks with sophisticated server-side filtering options. I was in Earthlink's hands and its technology was insufficient to solve the problem. With this deadend came the realization that I would have to find my own solution.
ELECTION YEAR PROPAGANDA
That solution is most certainly not coming from Congress. The recently passed anti-spam legislation that zoomed to the president's desk is a perfect example of why the spam problem is so insidious. Designed for election year propaganda, the new spam law is actually a setback because it preempts a much tougher California law, set to take effect in January, as well as better anti-spam bills pending in 35 other states.
Lobbyists for e-mail marketers, who give lots of money to members of Congress, won the spam debate after defeating any "opt-in" strategy and demanding a single national "opt-out" standard that overrides all state laws. The spam pushers also forced Congress to back away from such useful anti-spam tactics as required language in the subject line of commercial e-mail-like "ADV" for advertising-or for the right of e-mail recipients to individually sue spammers.
At least 15 states currently require "ADV" or a similar label on unsolicited commercial e-mail. Though the labeling requirement certainly won't stop all spam, it's a good start because a simple rule can be set in any e-mail application to block incoming mail with the "ADV" marking.
Under the new law, spammers will still be allowed to send unsolicited e-mail as long as the message contains an opt-out mechanism, a valid subject line indicating it is an advertisement, and the legitimate physical address of the mailer. Actual subject line language is left to the industry.
Despite all the anti-spam rhetoric, Congress bowed to the pressure of the spammers and gutted serious efforts to get the problem under control. The dark side of capitalism prevailed. As for that "opt out" list-oh please! How long do you think it will take for any "do not spam" list to hit the spammer's black market?
"The bill creates so many loopholes, exceptions and high standards of proof that it provides minimal consumer protections and creates too many burdens for effective enforcement," said the National Association of Attorneys General in a letter to Congress. "We respectfully request that you not move forward..."
Of course, spam lobbyists-fearful of state laws with real teeth-demanded that Congress go forward. "You're talking about preempting laws that the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general haven't been able to enforce. With the new law, they can be busy not enforcing a federal law," Ray Everett-Church, a lawyer at ePrivacy Group, told CNET News.
OK, since our representatives won't fix the spam problem through public policy, it's now up to us e-mail users to enlist technology to outsmart the spammers ourselves. This is not an easy task for individuals and small organizations, since the choices of spam-fighting technology can be confusing and the solutions are often ineffective.
Frustrated that my ISP's Brightmail anti-spam system was allowing too much spam through the gate, I explored several spam blockers for desktop e-mail client applications. They included SpamSieve, Spamfire and Apple Mail's Bayesian filter for OS X. All effectively identified and segregated most spam. However, a lot of legitimate e-mail also got caught in the spam net, causing me to spend a lot of time sifting through the junk to pull out the good messages.
Since Earthlink's new challenge-response system won't work with POP e-mail clients on Macintosh computers, I tried one of its competitors, Mailblocks, a more advanced challenge-response e-mail service that works across platforms. In a challenge-response system like Mailblocks, new senders have to answer a challenge e-mail in order to get through to your mailbox. This one-time challenge blocks most junk since spammers don't go to the trouble of answering the query.
After uploading a "white list" of my approved users to its server, Mailblocks kicked in, proving quite effective in blocking spam. Its challenge-response dialog, though annoying to some legitimate e-mail senders, works well and its Web-mail access is excellent. But I found Mailblocks' IMAP functionality using desktop e-mail clients a bit slow and clumsy for my taste. It may be a good solution for many users, but I prefer a POP 3 account.
THE LIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE
So I kept looking. After stumbling into some favorable Internet comments from satisfied customers, I discovered the best e-mail solution I've yet to experience. The service is from a small ISP in Boston called Lux Scientiae (meaning "the light of knowledge" but the short, less pretentious name is LuxSci, pronounced luck sigh). Though LuxSci can handle both e-mail and Web hosting, I chose its high-end e-mail service that is available to anyone from individuals to large corporations.
What makes the LuxSci service so special is its partnership for E-mail Guard with MXLogic Solutions, a Denver-based specialist in blocking spam, viruses and content filtering. I don't fully understand how E-mail Guard works, but it does the job very, very well-better than any spam blocking technology I've ever used. Plus, I found the customer service personnel at LuxSci quick and helpful, ready and willing to help a novice through the set-up choices.
Using the LuxSci service, my spam has been reduced to less than five or six messages a day (they claim a 98 percent record of effectiveness). Just as important, I don't have to spend time wallowing through dozens of spam suspects to retrieve good mail. It somehow just works, and I have yet to knowingly lose a legitimate message. The cost, depending on extra services, is well under $10 a month.
It's unfortunate that controlling spam has come to this level of trouble and cost, but it appears that the only way for us small fry to fight the beast is to outsmart the spammers with better technology. So let us protect ourselves. No one else is going to.
For more information on the services described in this column, visit www.luxsci.com/, www.mxlogic.com/ and www.mailblocks.com/.
