Peter Griffin: Spam is clobbering legitimate bulk emailers

Think for a moment about the following piece of information: Xtra, the country's largest internet provider with 600,000 customers, blocks 20 million to 25 million spam emails each week.

That's a lot of unsolicited junk email sent out by spammers, who are usually based offshore.

We all want to see the death of spam. Even if you have good filters diverting spam to a folder you never look at, the cost of providing the internet bandwidth to accommodate all that traffic and the software required to sift through it is significant. We ultimately pay for it in higher internet charges.

Xtra has joined other local internet service providers in blocking email sent to 100 recipients or more. It's a two-way thing. If you're an Xtra email account holder you won't be able to receive the email if you're on the list. If you're a sender, the mail won't be delivered if the group has 100 or more addresses.

Xtra is following best practice by ISPs overseas and other local providers have already done it (ihug blocks email to groups with more than 50 addresses, and Clearnet's magic number is 128).

But there are legitimate reasons for sending out bulk email messages. The sender may want to tell all the members of their tennis club about an upcoming tournament or, if it's a business, send a newsletter to customers. With the blocking, it's becoming increasingly difficult to do these innocuous things.

The trend is forcing small businesses to start using more expensive software or monthly mail subscription packages. This is the real down-side of spam - innocent net users take the fall for the actions of a small group of abusers.

There are a few options for those who want to keep on sending bulk emails - the simplest is limiting the recipient list to 99 or fewer. Rather than sending one email to 250 people, the same can be accomplished by sending out three.

Senders can also invest in software that ships off email automatically, either individually or in groups, among them Bmail, Mailman and Lyris. They range in price, from free for up to 50 recipients to several thousand dollars for the industrial-strength packages that send to tens of thousands of people automatically.

The good ones use a double opt-in mechanism that ensures recipients have a say over what they receive. They also expose IP addresses so the recipient knows where the message has come from.

A better option for those sending regular newsletters to hundreds or thousands of people is a hosted email service.One such service is available through the small business website at ourbiz.co.nz, which allows users to send up to 5000 emails a month for $50. The service is hosted by email marketing company BKA Interactive (www.bka.co.nz), which supplies the necessary software. As email becomes a more important marketing tool, leveraging off the experience of an email marketing company may even improve mail-out results.

Xtra's move, unfortunately, is a blanket policy and there's no "white-list" senders can apply for. Xtra simply has too many customers to police such a list.

But once again, the ISP's actions have been badly executed. Xtra has admitted it should have had the policy in place years ago, but it started blocking bulk emails in March without giving any notice to its users. It had the right to do so because the restriction on bulk emailing has been sitting overlooked in its terms and conditions since 2003.

The timing of Xtra's move to enforce its policy is interesting.

With the Unsolicited Electronic Messaging Bill before Parliament, Xtra's owner Telecom and others in the industry, including Internet NZ and the Direct Marketing Association, are keen to ensure a Government body within the Department of Internal Affairs is set up to deal with complaints about spamming.

When it's illegal to send unsolicited messages to New Zealand email accounts, the level of complaints will soar and ISPs don't want to be left to sort out the disputes that will inevitably arise. Xtra wants to send a message that it's getting tough on spam to encourage the formation of such a body.

As for the legislation, will it work? Not likely. It's a gesture of good intent, but most spam originates outside New Zealand and those users who are caught in the dragnet are a tiny percentage of the spammers' daily catch.

Ultimately it comes down to the individual user. If an email is an ad for generic Viagra or a $10 copy of Windows XP, for God's sake don't reply to it. Determining the legitimate businesses from the spammers can be difficult, but recipients would do well to check the email's domain name and find out about the company sending it before replying.

Otherwise they'll just end up on another automatic list labelled "live suckers".