than the mail
Douglas Rushkoff
Online
Never, ever, respond to an e-mail advert again. You’ll be doing yourself and the rest of us trying to work or play on the Internet a big favour.
I’ve made a habit, perhaps even an ethic, of shrugging off commercial advances on the Internet. Since the real estate in cyberspace is effectively infinite, I have tended to adopt an attitude of live and let live. Although at least 20 spam messages find their way into my mailbox each day, I’ve become pretty good at identifying the “subject lines” of adverts and then deleting without even reading them.
But as I sit here in a hotel room in Edinburgh, attempting to file my weekly column via e-mail, I realise that spam has effectively crippled my ability to conduct Internet tasks I used to find easy. This means war.
Like many of you, I use a program called Eudora to send and receive e-mail. No matter where I am or what service I’ve used, it lets me identify the place on my home server where e-mail is kept, and then send or receive messages. This way, even though my home server only has a New York phone number and I’m in Scotland, I can use the local United Kingdom dial-in number for the Microsoft Network or any other service where I have an account, and then hop over and get my e-mail. No long-distance calls required.
But this week, when I tried to reply to some e-mail, I got a disturbing message: “Error 550, access denied.” Access denied?
After a harrowing series of long- distance calls with my provider, I learned the painful truth. The same feature that allows me to send e-mail from a foreign server allows ruthless spam advertisers to send e-mail with no return address.
See, spammers know that most people hate them and that sending unwanted mail to millions of recipients is grounds for having their accounts terminated by their own access providers. To mask their own originating addresses, they have exploited the way the Internet passes mail from server to server. They use third-party hosts, like my service provider, as a relay for their mail. The routing headers imply, to anyone but the most educated Internet users, that the mail comes from the third-party’s mail server.
The problems this creates for Internet service providers can be catastrophic. First, relaying an extra few million e-mail addresses puts a tremendous stress on the mail server, slowing down everybody’s connections or even overloading the server altogether. Then, since the spam seems to coming from the innocent, third-party server, annoyed recipients complain to the victimised provider. This means more angry e-mail and phone calls for them to process.
Worse, when other service providers detect that a large amount of spam mail is coming from the innocent, offending mail server, they often choose to block all mail from that server. Once this happens, no subscriber of the first provider can reach anyone on any of services that have blocked their own provider.
In an attempt to protect itself from abuse by spammers, my service provider is re- engineering its system so that hosts outside its own network are now unable to relay mail through its machines. This happens to include the hosts I have always used to send e-mail when I’m on the road. I know there are other solutions to my problem. I can use Telnet to connect to my server, but then I lose the capabilities like attaching files or automatically saving messages to my hard drive.
Solutions? For starters, take your e- mail address off your Web page. Spammers use programs that automatically search Web pages for addresses. Instead, spell it out, as in “rushkoff at inteport.net” and explain why you’ve done so.
Also, don’t browse the Web from your usual account or with your normal e-mail address. Any site you visit can collect and sell your address. Ask your service provider how to create a pseudonymous e- mail address.
Visit and for more ideas on how to stamp out this plague. c Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff can be reached at