************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** You may have noticed last month your newsreader report a new newsgroups, news.admin.net-abuse.email. Unsolicited commercial email (UCE) isn't new but it's been growing in amount and frequency in the last several months. A couple incidents as of late brought UCE to the forefront. America Online (AOL) duked it out in court with a company called Cyberpromo. Cyberpromo believed it had the constitutional right to dump millions of UCEs on AOL. AOL felt it was doing its client base a favor by throttling the messages and bouncing back one mega-wad that overburdened Cyberpromo's service provider. Much to delight of net users looking for some favorable precedent setting, a court ruled against Cyberpromo because AOL wasn't acting "in the feet of the state." Front page news was made in October by some slime who seemingly spammed everyone on the net, claming to offer illegal pornography. Most saw it as a forgery --likely meant to embarrass AOL -- but it underscored what can happen when you make your email address public via net.news or your web page. Mail robots, "stripper bots," can grab large numbers of email addresses from Usenet postings or web pages and fire off millions of messages. As a heavy user of net.news, I get one or two UCEs a day. If the amount of spam that gets posted to Usenet is any indication, it will soon be ten or twenty, crowding out email that's actually meant for you. In an ad age where marketers talk of "narrow casting," it's almost amusing watching idiots peddle hair loss potions using a mass communication model that hasn't been popular since 1939. But who cares? As far as direct costs go, there's no difference between sending email to one person or one million. Real costs come later. Spammers who think a 1-800 number in their UCE will generate lots of sales inquiries find it generates calls by people asking to be removed from the mailing list. And then there are nasty individuals willing to work three banks of pay phones to help top up a spammer's phonebill. If you're upset by UCE, I don't suggest the latter approach. The traditional, appropriate response to UCE is a polite but firm message to the sender and his postmaster (e.g., postmaster@spamsite.com) saying you don't appreciate spam. If a 1-800 number is offered, explain your views on the spammer's dime. Just don't abuse it or be abusive. Unfortunately, toll- free numbers and even valid return email addresses are increasingly rare in UCE these days. Most spammers slap a fake return address on their mail and offer little more than a P.O. Box. It's the drift net approach. You're a dolphin. They're really looking for a fish who will mail off $29.99 to a P.O. box for a XXX CD-ROM.