In the war on spam, legitimate business gets caught in the crossfire.

Like most people besieged by spam, Naoki Yamamoto favored aggressive blocking of unsolicited e-mail. That was until his e-mail address wound up on the blocked list.

Yamamoto, the editor and founder of the Matatabi Report, an online technology newsletter, explained his situation in a post to an Internet mailing list. "I was awakened by a phone call from one of my clients," he said. "She was furious at me about [some] returned e-mail messages. She was trying to send me the page proof of an article that [needed to] be taken care of within a couple of hours." He tested the mail server by sending a message to himself. The server refused the connection from his ISP in Tokyo.

Yamamoto had the misfortune of owning an IP address in a sketchy neighborhood. According to Steve Atkins, CTO of e-mail and privacy consultancy Word to the Wise, the Asian IP address block-primarily the range of addresses at 210.7.xxx.xxx-is responsible for sending or relaying between 30 and 50 percent of all spam messages. "A lot of insecure Korean Web proxies are being heavily abused by spammers," he explains. "And Cn.net seems happy to have people spam from China."

Still, Atkins contends that reports about Asian Internet addresses being blocked are exaggerated. "I don't believe that large ranges of Asian IP addresses are being blocked by any significant ISPs or companies," he says. "I do believe, though, that there are a lot of people administering mail servers who-if they see abuse from addresses in 210.7-will not bother notifying the administrator of the Asian network, but will instead just block that address."
As other sources suggest, Word to the Wise CEO Laura Atkins says that while insecure servers in Asia may help spam on its way, she believes most spam originates in the United States. "American spammers are basically hijacking [Asian] machines, breaking into them, and using them to send spam, because that hides them," says Atkins.

Spam Spreads
In truth, the spam problem is international. And it's getting a lot worse. "There's 16 times as much spam as there was two years ago," says Joyce Graff, a Gartner VP. "It's going up exponentially."
Jupiter Media Metrix estimates that in 2001, each e-mail user received 571 unsolicited commercial messages. The research firm predicts that number will rise to 1,479 by 2006. At five seconds per message, every user will annually waste over two hours deleting spam. At $25 per hour per employee, the cost to large businesses becomes substantial. And this doesn't include the potential legal liability for pornographic spam or the cost of hardware upgrades to handle the torrent.

At e-mail solutions provider Brightmail, where so-called spam masters fend off incoming spam in real time for corporate clients, VP of marketing François Lavaste has been watching the situation deteriorate-a state of affairs he attributes in part to an anthrax-inspired e-mail boom. "About a year ago, the volume of spam on average, vis-à-vis the total number of messages floating through the Internet, was about 10 percent," he says. "Today, on average, we're above 20 percent, and in some cases, with very large ISPs or organizations, the volume of spam can actually be higher than 50 percent. It's a huge problem."

Attorney Anne P. Mitchell, director of public and legal affairs for MAPS, the Mail Abuse Prevention System, observes that spam impacts businesses on both technical and personnel levels. "Businesses increasingly find that they have to expand their machine capacity and their administrator time to deal with the increasing amount of e-mail [that floods] their systems-much of which is an unwanted and expensive nuisance," she says.

Your Problem, Our Revenue
Mirroring the codependence of security companies and hackers, e-mail providers are warming to the idea of protection money. "While we recognize spam as an inconvenience," says Tim Wright, chief technical officer at Terra Lycos, "we also see our ability to help consumers manage it as a value-added service that we can sell."

And as the promises of miracle baldness cures and herbal Viagra pour in, Naoki Yamamoto's experience is repeated around the globe: In mid-March, when British Telecom introduced measures to combat spam, software company Barwick Systems, among other BT clients in the United Kingdom, discovered that some of its e-mail had been misidentified as spam and deleted.
In the war on spam, that's bound to happen, says Ray Everett-Church, chief privacy officer at ePrivacy Group. "It's all unfortunate collateral damage," he says. "But when you're fighting this kind of battle, innocents do get caught up in it."

Meanwhile, Yamamoto expects further problems. "I've been trying to find a less painful way to live with the future IP blocks," he says. "I asked the ISP if they would inform their international customers when they implement a massive IP block, either by e-mail or by putting a notice on their Web page. My request was rejected by the administrator because he did not wish to inform customers who might not be affected." Yamamoto continues his search for a remedy suitable to all parties.

As Everett-Church cautions, "There are very few miracle cures here . . . despite what the spam says."
Does Spam Work?
Perhaps the worst thing about spam is that it appears to actually work: It takes only a few suckers to enrich the spammer.

"For someone who's trying to sell something over the Net," says Gartner's Joyce Graff, "if they can get even half of 1 percent of the people they [spam] to send them $20, then the payoff is pretty good."

Search for a spammer to confirm this (www.spamhaus.org) and you'll hit a lot of dead-ends like phony phone numbers, false addresses, and unanswered e-mail queries. That these people don't want to be found says a lot about their business.

Still, some dared to answer, including one who identified himself as Robert Craig. His site, www.marketing-thru-email.com, offers a list of 42 million e-mail addresses for $50. While he ignored questions about the demographics and the legitimacy of his list, he did say that mass mailing works.

"The typical response," he says, "is approximately 4 to 5 percent, but it depends on the letter that is sent and the product or service advertised. Usually, such mailings are very effective. If we send 10 million e-mails, it might return 10,000 visitors. The percent of buyers can vary from 1 to 10 percent. Imagine that the product costs $100. [If] we receive 10,000 visitors and [5 percent buy], we have 500 sales. [That's] $50,000 in sales. It doesn't need any explanation."