INDEPTH: SPAM
Spam blocking: are you getting the messages you want?
Robin Rowland, CBC News Online | November 27, 2003
Your mailbox fills up with e-mail touting miracle drugs and get-rich-quick schemes. So you install a spam blocker. Then the question you have to ask is, are you getting the messages you want, or have some legitimate messages been automatically deleted and forever lost?
It turns out that is what happened to me, though, oddly, as a sender, not a receiver. For almost five months, from August 2002 until January 2003, the United States National Archives and Records Administration was blocking all the messages from one of Canada's largest Internet Service Providers, Sympatico, whose latest figures show it has more than two million subscribers.
In August, I had been sending e-mail to the National Archives in Washington inquiring about some declassified documents. I was referred to the Modern Military Branch of the Archives, but never received a reply. Nor was there a reply to a second or third e-mail.
Finally, I sent a letter, the old fashioned way, and received a reply saying that their records showed that none of my e-mails had been received.
Then, in late December 2002, I sent an e-mail to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. Again I received no reply. Again I followed up with a letter – and received an e-mail reply from an archivist.
I replied by e-mail but followed up with a phone call. The archivist then suggested I send another e-mail, to both her office address and to her personal address. She received the latter, but not the message to the office. She referred the problem to the archives technical section, and it was discovered that for some reason, in late August 2002, the archives service had put a spam block on all messages from Sympatico.
A spokeswoman for the National Archives told CBC.ca that she would find out how the problem originated but, at this point, there has been no reply.
What should happen
These days Internet Service Providers (ISPs) adhere to a set of accepted protocols for sending and receiving e-mail, says Peter Costanzo, director of service quality and delivery for Sympatico.
The ISPs that don't adhere to these practices usually end up on a "block list" created either by one of the companies that provide spam-blocking services or by ad hoc and anti-spam advocacy groups. ISPs that have a problem with spam can often name another ISP as an offender.
When an ISP is block-listed and it comes to that company's attention, the ISP acts very quickly, Costanzo says. The ISP identifies the source of the problem and then its operations team works with the complaining ISP to solve the problem.
"Once you've corrected your problem, the originating ISP may take you down off the block list," Costanzo says. But some ISPs may not be so quick to remove the blocks, which means the problem can go on for some time until the company's name is removed.
Blocking spam
ISPs work to block both outgoing and incoming spam, Costanzo says.
Sympatico uses software from the spam-blocking company BrightMail to monitor both.
The software looks for certain patterns that identify the message as spam.
For example, outgoing mail is checked to see if the domain it's from is real or fictitious; if the domain is phoney, the mail is "dropped." The filters also prevent non-Sympatico users from using the ISP as a gateway to send spam.
For incoming e-mail, the filtering software now allows customers to interact and choose what mail they want. Any possible spam is sent to a "grey mail" box that the customer can then discard or, if it's legitimate mail, tell the software to send it to a regular mailbox.
Sympatico has an action team for spam that has members from different departments, including network operations, marketing and customer service. It meets regularly to explore options so that it's "proactive," Costanzo says.
As for the spam that still ends up in my mailbox, "There are a number of ways this could have fallen through the cracks," he says, adding that spam is "not good for business" for Sympatico or any other ISP.
Bell Canada, which owns Sympatico, would not give CBC.ca an estimate of the cost of fighting spam, but it's clear that with dedicated teams at every major ISP, spam is costing those companies a lot of money, a cost that's passed on to the customer. And it's also the customer who pays in the time it takes to download all that spam.
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November 26, 2003:
On CBC Newsworld, David Gray interviews media lawyer Michael Geist from the University of Ottawa Law School about how to tackle spam.
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On CBC Newsworld, Christopher Thomas interviews Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian about how Canada is fighting spam.
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