The White House
ATTN: George W. Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC, 20500
Dear Mr. President:

Everyday, advertisers both corporate and personal send out literally millions of pieces of electronic mail boasting everything from alleged ancient Chinese remedies to how to take part in the next generation of multilevel marketing schemes. According to Jupiter Media Metrix, it is estimated that each internet user received 571 spam messages in 2001. By 2006, it is expected that that number will rise to 1500 (Black, 1). In this age of failed Internet based advertising revenue, Advertisers and work-from-home-offices alike have found a new moneymaker with Unsolicited Corporate Email, overloading corporate mail servers across the county, causing millions of dollars in storage and legal costs. It is absolutely imperative that the federal government, particularly Congress and the agencies governing interstate communication, move to put an end to this menace as soon as possible.

What is Spam?

Defined in Lexico Publishing Group’s Dictionary.com, to spam is “To indiscrimately send large amounts of unsolicited e-mail meant to promote a product or service” (Dictionary.com, 1). The word was actually garnered from a skit in which Monty Python repeatedly used the word, "ad nauseum" and has since become an icon for anything repeated over and over again in an annoying manner (Lewis, 54). Brightmail, a San Francisco based spam management company, has recently run a study suggesting that spam makes up 36%, or more than a third, of all email sent over the internet, an increase from 8 percent on studies a year ago. “We saw 2.3 billion messages go through all of our customer sites in July and 825 million were spam,” says CEO and President Enrique Salem, “the amount of spam has skyrocketed. That’s a real problem and people are seeing it” (Oldenburg, C1).

Why does spam thrive?

Spam offers marketing companies, innovative product releases, websites, and advertisers a way to reach a targeted demographic of computer users with information on just about anything that comes to market. Ray Everett-Church, Chief Privacy Officer for ePrivacy Group, a Philadelphia-based consulting firm, believes that the primary reason that people are willing to send spam is that “The people hardest hit when the economy turns down start looking for things to augment their income” (Oldenburg, C1). Not only is it a possible source of income during hard economic times but it is a very inexpensive way to market information to a large base of users. As John Levine, operator of Abuse.net, noted, “No other kind of advertising costs the advertiser so little and the recipient so much.” (Oldenburg, C1). Unlike paper mailings, telemarketing, or other formerly used mass marketing strategies, sending electronic mail requires no real base of assets which means that even promoters of questionable content can be reasonably sure of their security when using this method of delivery. Once you have a web connected computer, “you can get into the spamming business for just a few hundred dollars,” says Everett-Church (Oldenburg, C1). Furthermore, the actual cost for transmission of this type of advertising is extremely inexpensive compared to other modes of mass media including handbills, TV, radio, and posters. One spammer interviewed for a Wall Street Journal report says that their cost to send out a batch of 500,000 spam emails is about $250 (Mangalindan, A1), well below the cost levels of various other mass media outlets for the same prospective range.

In this age of internet transcendence, sending spam email is one of the most lucrative ventures in corporate advertising targeting a digital audience. In the case the mass advertiser interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, a Ms. Betterly, working with unsolicited email advertising provides for a “flexible schedule that allows her to enjoy her children and the 5,000 square foot home, with a pool, that she shares with them and a roommate.” (Mangalindan, A1). Email advertising is a high paying business depending on the commissions contracts that the advertisers negotiate, “Ms. Betterly quickly discovered that she could make a profit if she got as few as 100 responses for every 10 million messages sent for a client, and she figures her income will be $200,000 this year” (Mangalindan, A1). One of the most attractive things about email marketing is that the cost to profit-per-sale ratio is so low that spammers can make a profit on a sale response of just 0.001% for high volume soliciting. As Peter Lewis noted in his article for Home Office Computing, “Commercial spamming is easy, cheap, fast, environmentally friendly, and in most cases legal” (Lewis, 54).

Resource Drain

Unfortunately, the price of this seemingly inexpensive and lucrative advertising medium must be paid somewhere and it is all too often paid by those who receive the spam. The primary, and most damaging costs, of spam preying on the users of the internet is that of the sheer storage and resources which are required to house and process the email messages that are waiting for users to read them. An Internet Service Provider with one million customers will spend more than $500,000 for new hardware, software, and personnel annually dedicated to the war against spam (Black). For corporations, the costs go beyond just the raw resource expenses that are incurred housing this foul media but extend to the time that their employees must spend in dealing with it. “A company with 500 employees, each of whom receives five junk emails per day and spends about 10 seconds deleting each one, can expect to lose close to $40,000 per year in wasted salaries and 105 days in lost productivity” (Black, 1). These costs are not paid for in a neutral simulation but affect the every day operation of the systems and companies that must change and adapt to handle the volume of email that is sent to users on network systems every day. According to a survey of internet service providers done by the United States House Committee on Commerce, 79% of surveyed internet service providers reported that spam slows system performance and 75.9% reported that it increases operating costs (Protecting, 1).

Recipient Irritation

Aside from the costs and the space that spam requires on an enterprise level, spam affects each and every internet user on a psychological level as a source of irritation and a barrier to introducing new people to the internet. I believe Peter Lewis said it best when he explained that, “Spamming is the internet equivalent of restaurant menus stuffed under the door or printed fliers plastered on car windshields, raised by several levels of magnitude… It is also rude, intrusive, and obnoxious – sort of like breaking wind in an elevator, [or] playing a boombox stereo at full volume in the park…” (Lewis, 54). Unsolicited email sometimes acts as stimuli to our personalities, particularly for those of us who spend large amounts of time on the internet. John Suller, a professor at Rider University and a specialist in internet psychology, recently explained, “some people experience their computers as sort of an extension of themselves, of their own psyche and mind, and to have this much spam come into that space is a real violation” (Oldenburg, C1). The intrusion of spam into the life of regular citizens is so prevalent that “A survey of US internet service providers found that 94% reported that spam, or junk email, ‘irritates their subscribers’” (Protecting, 63). Part of the problem that the internet population has such a problem with is that much of the volume of the information provided to internet users has to do with pornographic adult entertainment, often including graphic depictions of sexual acts within the emails themselves. John Levine summed it up during an interview, “People are getting really upset of the porn. And that will make people angry enough to do something about it. Porn is what will put spam on people’s radar as not just an annoyance but a serious problem” (Oldenburg, C1).

Spam Related Services Costs

The fight over the right to send unsolicited advertising has spawned a new niche in the legal services marketplace for advocacy groups and legal firms intent on impacting the war over spam. While the extent to which this new market will expand is unavailable to us, early indicators suggest rapid opportunity expansion for those firms involved both with spam prevention and corporate internet litigation. One of the products of the war on spam is Brightmail, a company “which numbers AT&T Worldnet and Earthlink among its clients, [designing] a system that combines technology with a large does of human intervention” (Black, 1). Brightmail was one of the first but is by no means the only spam filtering organization available for corporate protection. In other corridors and office buildings, entire offices are being filled with the litigation relating to the fraud and false advertising issued by some email campaigns. Strong Capital Management, Inc, a financial services company in Wisconsin, is suing a spammer for allegedly stealing its address, thinking that the recipients would be more likely to open spam from a prestigious firm than an ordinary internet marketer (Hamblen, 1). Law suits like this one are becoming more common, and until federal legislation to curb spam and clearly define the guidelines for electronic violations is passed, the market for spam-related legal services is expected to climb into the millions of dollars.

Government Legislation

Through the spam-induced anxieties, millions of dollars in resource costs, and the increasingly aggressive content of email advertising, spam has become a hot topic for government legislators and citizens alike. The Federal Government has recently become involved in commercial email monitoring, the “Federal Trade Commission currently receives 40,000 spam complaints a day at its website” (Lee, G1), a far larger number than anyone could reasonably expect them to process through and prosecute. Meanwhile, the volume of spam traversing the internet continues to grow, generating money, frustration, and a hot topic for internet regulation. Until congress passes regulatory guidelines for commercial email advertising, there is no real reason for the advertisers to discontinue their deluge of product specials and contest winnings, attacking us daily at our local inbox.

Works Cited

Black, Jane. “The High Price of Spam.” Business Week Online. 4 March 2002. Online. Extended Academic ASAP. 2002.

Hamblen, Matt and Deck, Stewart. “Spam Attacks send Angry Firms to Courts.” Computerworld. 18 Aug 1997: 33.

Lee, Jennifer. “Spam: An Escalating Attack of the Clones.” New York Times. 27 Jun. 2002: G1+

Lovelace, Herbert W. “Swimming In A Sea Of Spam.” InformationWeek. 21 May 2001: 122.

Lewis, Peter. “Hold the Spam.” Home Office Computing. Jan., 1997: 54.

Mangalindan, Mylene. “’Spam Queen’: For Bulk E-Mailer, Pestering Millions Offers Path to Profit --- Even if Most People Ignore Her, Ms. Betterly Can Succeed; It’s Legal and Easy to Do --- A Prized List of Addresses.” Wall Street Journal. 13 Nov 2002: A1.

Newman, Heather. ”Tech Today: Help Desk: E-Mailers Get More Help Fighting Spammer’s Tricks.” Detroit Free Press. 4 Sept. 2002: A2.

Oldenburg, Don. “Spam and Ughs As Unsavory E-Mail Bloats the In-Box, Fed-Up Recipients Turn to the Law.” The Washington Post. 2 Sept 2002: C1.

Protecting Consumers