CAUCE

Q&A: I'm being forged - HELP!

Dear CAUCE Team,

We are looking for support resources to thwart a massive spam/forgery attack that misuses our company name -- claiming we are the spam source. The spam contains url links to numerous computers that apparently download viruses. We are looking for assistance and guidance in dealing with this. Any suggestions?

Regards,
Forged

Q&A: Are unsubscribes just a courtesy or a requirement?

From time to time we get questions from our members and we will try to answer many of them here.

I work for an organization that has a "community" portion of its site. People sign up and among the "benefits" they get is a newsletter. There is no way to opt out of this newsletter and we get a lot of complaints about it. This organization is run by an individual who would not be likely to listen to any employee who pointed out that an opt out or unsubscribe option would not only be courteous but also probably less illegal than what we're doing now.

Q: How can we shake the boss up to alert her to the fact that people should be able to unsubscribe?

Are Invitations spam?

Q1 - I would like to know if inviting viewers of my email to subscribe to my newsletters that I send out from MyNewSite.com seen as spam?

Q2 - As I surf on the internet and come across a group or individual I would like to invite to subscribe to my group on Mysite.com and the newsletter?

I bought/rented a list of Opt-in names, but now I'm being accused of spamming. Why? What should I do different?

If somebody offers to sell you a bulk list of 'opt-in' email addresses, you're almost certainly getting a spam list. What you're going to receive from them is a list of addresses belonging to people who have not agreed to receive messages, or a list that's been mailed to so often that it is no longer useful to other mailers. To put it another way, whatever they might have opted into, it wasn't mail from you.

As a sender, it is your job to confirm that your list is truly opt-in. Where do you begin? Doing your homework saves headaches later - headaches driven by poor results, spam complaints, blacklisting, wasted time and money, and bad PR. In other words this is not a responsibility you can shirk by saying 'I have no way of knowing how accurate or authentic these names are' or 'They guy from the list rental organization says it's opt-in'. It's your responsibility to know about the names your communicating with. Sending unsolicited commercial email will bring a number of problems to your email program, to mention a few; Major DNSBL listings and ISP blocking, recipient complaints, and a negative sender reputation

Why does my government allow spam?

Governments are catching up with spam laws, but sadly many have not legislated this yet. Canada has no spam laws, even though the "Federal Anti-Spam Task Force" recommended this in 2004. Country specific laws can be found at Spamlaws.com

The United States has legislated email with CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) in 2003. This law require several elements of a commercial email message conform to a minimum set of standards. Here is a rundown of the law's main provisions:

• It bans false or misleading header information
• It prohibits deceptive subject lines
• It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method, which must be processed within 10 days of receiving by the sender
• It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address

Unsolicited bulk e-mail that complies with these rules is legal under CAN SPAM, even though such UBE is widely considered to be spam.

The Internet community is also working on several global initiatives to help stem the tide of unsolicited commercial email, CAUCE recently endorsed the Senders BCP published by MAAWG, written mostly by Email Service Providers with input from ISPs, Corporations and RBL providers.

Why does my ESP/ISP allow spam?

Most ESPs and ISPs have policies in place that prevent their users from sending spam, however not all of these policies are correctly enforced. Many times spam activity continues because there are no complaints being sent to an ESPs or ISP, or these complaints are being ignored by the abuse desk staff.

If your ESP or ISP is supporting spam by playing ignorant, you may begin to have issues with your own email. Moving to a new provider that has a strong anti-spam policy is your best option.

Is there any way to make them stop?

There are several initiatives in progress to help with this growing problem, these include;

• Email authentication and reputation services
• ISP filtering of inbound and outbound email, port 25 (mail transport service) blocking
• The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has ISPs, anti-spam solutions and Large Commercial email marketers working together to build best practices and share information on spam issues.

Why do they keep sending me this garbage?

Spammers continually send email with different subjects and offers in order to entice users to buy their products. Many of these products are; fakes and knock-offs or potentially dangerous to the purchaser. Due to the low cost of sending spam, even with the extremely low response rate, spammers can make a significant profit fairly easily. The more emails a spammer can send, the greater his profit while the cost remains nearly zero.

Spammers rarely honor opt-out requests. It's work for them to process opt-outs, sending less spam doesn't cost them any less, and who knows, you might be one of the suckers who responds next time.

Where does spam come from? Why?

Unlike direct mail or telemarketing, email spam has very low per-message cost. In many cases spammers have almost no cost because they are sending email through other people's computers that are infected with a worm or virus, which causes others to bear the cost of their messaging. As a result, despite extremely low response rates, spammers can make a profit fairly easily. The more emails a spammer can send, the greater his profit while the cost remains nearly constant.

According to the information gathered by the Spamhaus Project, most of the systems used for sending spam are located in the United States. See the top 10 list here.

You talk about Costs. What costs? My email is unlimited...

You may pay a fixed price for "unlimited" service, but that doesn't mean your ISP's costs are limited. In fact, the question of cost highlights the flawed assumptions by those who engage in junk email marketing, and those who defend it.

It is not always apparent to the end user, much less the junk emailer, that there are many different places along the process of transmitting and delivering email where costs are incurred. In the Internet world, "cost" equals many different things besides money charged on a metered basis. For example, for an Internet service provider, "cost" includes things you might not even think of, such as the load on the processor in their mail servers. "CPU time" is a precious commodity and processor performance is a critical issue for ISPs. When a server is tied up processing spam, it creates a drag on all of the mail that must pass through it -- wanted and unwanted alike. This is also a problem with "filtering" schemes; filtering email consumes vast amounts of CPU time and is the primary reason most ISPs cannot implement it as a strategy for eliminating junk email.

ISPs purchase bandwidth -- their connection to the rest of the Internet -- based on their projected usage by their prospective user base. For most small to midsized ISPs, bandwidth costs are among one of the greatest portions of their budget and contributes to the reason why many ISPs have a tiny profit margin. Sans junk email, greater consumption of bandwidth would normally track with increased numbers of customers. However, when an outside entity (e.g., the junk emailer) begins to consume an ISP's bandwidth, the ISP has few choices:

1. Let the paying customers cope with slower Internet access
2. Absorb the costs of increasing bandwidth, which may effect the types of services offered
   
3. Raise rates.

In short, the recipients are still forced to bear costs that the advertiser has avoided. For more information about costs to businesses, please refer to an article from eWeek.