Slicing up spam
By Tai Viinikka

On my first day working for an Internet service provider, no one mentioned spam. That was in late 1995, and although we knew it was possible to send unsolicited email for commercial reasons, hardly anyone ever did so. Nine years later, 70 per cent of the traffic through mail servers is spam. The volume and the tactics have changed, but the underlying motivations are the same – and we are no closer to a solution.

Most people think of email spam as an annoyance and source of unintentional mirth or occasional disgust. Most people will simply delete emails they don't want. A few will set up a filter and much of their spam will disappear, along with a bit of their desired email -- misses and false positives are inevitable. But only a tiny minority of email users will ponder the total cost of spam, or consider who pays that cost.

The Radicati Group, a market research firm in Palo Alto, estimated that spam will cost $41.6 billion last year, in terms of lost productivity from corporate workers alone. But the real cost is much higher. Internet Service Providers run most of the large and powerful email gateways, and they also deal with the most spam. It would seem that if 50% of your inbox is unwanted, then ISPs are being forced to build servers twice as big as would be necessary in a spam-free utopia. So it would seem.

But spammers launch their campaigns in automated blizzards of email, sending literally thousands of emails per second, so in order to continue serving their regular customers during this onslaught, ISPs overspend dramatically on mail service. During my years with a national ISP, the company was forced to spend more and more to keep up, eventually building systems around twenty times as powerful as would be needed for regular customer email. As a result, millions of dollars in hardware costs were passed on to the consumer. ISPs also buy or create specialized software and databases to allow them to recognize spam and refuse it, adding to the complexity and cost of handling email.