Hitting spammers where it hurts

By ADAM GIFFORD

Spamming is a US$500 million ($713.2 million) a year business. And that is only what the spammers make.

It doesn't include the earnings of those who make and distribute herbal Viagra, penis enlarging creams, ink cartridges and cheaper mortgages.

Not to mention the pay packet of Miss Joy Unongo, who emailed me from her desk at the foreign remittance department of Banque Internationale du Abidjan suggesting I lay claim to the US$17 million ($24.2 million) in the account of a foreign customer who died with his entire family in a plane crash.

"These guys are getting paid, so the economic incentive is clearly there. We have to take away that economic incentive," says Enrique Salem, chief executive of anti-spam company Brightmail.

Brightmail opened an Asia Pacific region office in Sydney last week to better cope with the increasing amount of double-byte spam - messages in Asian and other non-western alphabets.

The company wants to increase the amount it makes outside the United States from 20 per cent to 35 per cent of its revenue this year.

Salem would not say how much that is - Brightmail is a private company financed by three venture capital firms and utility vendor Symantec - but over the past six cash-positive quarters it has put US$30 million in cash in the bank.

It makes filters which stop spam at the gateway - the email servers at the internet service provider or the business.

Brightmail software is used by Telecom Xtra and TelstraClear, by seven of the 10 biggest internet providers in the United States and by 20 per cent of Fortune 500 companies.

About 15 per cent of all email goes through Brightmail filters.

The customer filters and the two million email addresses in its probe network give Brightmail formidable intelligence on what the spammers are up to, allowing technical staff to upgrade spam definitions every few minutes.

Driving Brightmail's growth is the huge increase in spam.

In January 2002, 16.5 per cent of internet traffic was spam. Last month the figure was 60 per cent, and some customers, such as Hong Kong Telecom's internet subsidiary, reported peaks of more than 90 per cent.

Salem said spam could be as much as 80 per cent of internet traffic before moves to mitigate its effect start having a real effect.

He was far less bullish than Microsoft's Bill Gates, who told the World Economic Forum at Davos last month the spam problem would be "solved" within two years.

The Gates formula was a mix of technology, including filters, and tax - charging a small payment for every email sent.

This would be a negligible cost for ordinary users, but prohibitive for spammers sending millions of messages a day.

"I would like to see micropayments on th.Net," Salem said. "It will facilitate a lot of commerce, but it is not going to happen in the next two or three years."

Analyst Bruce McCabe, who spoke at the launch, was more scathing, describing Gates as "extremely wrong".

"If you know who someone is so you can bill them, you have already solved the major challenge in addressing spam, that you can track securely people's identity. That is the holy grail of dealing with spam," McCabe said.

He said managing spam down to acceptable levels - it will never go away entirely - would require a mix of regulation, filtering, and new authentication and identity tracking technology.

Salem added a further requirement - end-user education on how to protect yourself online.

Legislation was also important, as it established that spam was not an acceptable way of doing business.

"I am sure there is a top 10 list of spammers, and you will see law agencies round the world go after those guys," Salem said.

This month, Brightmail will start its first serious attempt at authentication technology, Brightmail Reputation Service.

It will identify high-volume email sources, and block those known to have sent spam.

"But just knowing who someone is does not mean they are not sending me spam," Salem said.

"The Reputation Services allows people to send us a message saying 'this email was unsolicited'. If we get lots of complaints about a user, we can put them on the block list."

Authentication uses a previously little-used feature of the process for creating an IP (internet protocol) address.

When the domain name system was designed, an extra field was created for a text record.

Salem said this could be used to link a mail server, which has an IP address, with a specific business.

* Adam Gifford travelled to Sydney as a guest of Brightmail.

Spam, spam, spam

* Spam, defined as unsolicited commercial email or bulk email, or "anything I don't want in my in-box", poses challenges for regulators.

* In January, 60 per cent of the 85 billion emails passing through Brightmail filters were spam.

* In New Zealand and Australia, scams and fraud accounted for 9 per cent of spam, adult content was 18 per cent and product advertisements 26 per cent.

* Almost 80 per cent of spam came from North America, and only 1.6 per cent from Australia and New Zealand.