CAUCE

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.

What can I do about child pornography spam?

According to the US Customs Service: "There is no easy formula for discovering and identifying a consumer or purveyor of child pornography. However, if you have information about or suspect this type of illegal activity, contact the U.S. Customs Service as soon as possible. Call 1-800-BE-ALERT.

The U.S. Customs Service also works closely with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to combat the proliferation of this disturbing material. You can also report suspicious activity relating to child pornography to their "Tipline" at 1-800-843-5678. In addition, the Interpol website gives an email address of "[email protected]" as an address to report suspected child pornography. The address accepts mail but doesn't provide any feedback on what action will be taken. Given this uncertainty, reporting it via email isn't a bad thing to do, but we would suggest people in the US contact the US Customs service first.

Canaidan Residents should review Cybertip.ca for information and help.

Can't you solve the spam problem by requiring 'ADV' (or some other tag) in the subject line?

If every piece of spam had a tag or a label (such as "ADV:") in the subject line, it might be easier to delete, but does that save you the time and money downloading the spam in the first place?

What if you make a long-distance call (as many millions of Americans do) or pay per-minute or per-kilobyte charges (as much of the world, and most users of wireless services do) to receive your email? Unfortunately, filtering on ADV doesn't save anything.

This is also verified by the United States Federal Trade Commission's conclusions, that tags like ADV would materially help consumers or ISPs to block unwanted commercial e-mail or to segregate commercial e-mail from other e-mail messages.

Just filter it at the ISP level, you say? Unfortunately, the way email works, email servers have to receive an email in its entirety before it's possible to scan the message looking for ADV in the subject line. More importantly, adding such filtering capability requires additional server capacity; if you double or triple the number of server actions needed to process an email message, you increase the amount of resources consumed by that message. So as the volume of spam continues to increase, even deleting every message tagged with ADV will eventually require more and more bandwidth, more and more server capacity, and more and more money.

Which is better: No spam at all or 50 spams properly labelled for deletion? The answers to this question is why CAUCE believes that tags and labels are not a viable solution to the spam problem.

What are you whining about? Just hit DELETE and be done with it!

When the <DELETE> key reimburses people for the costs incurred from transporting, storing, and retrieving unsolicited email, then simply clicking <DELETE> might be a viable alternative. Unfortunately, the vast majority of costs of spam are borne by recipients, and not senders. That makes clicking <DELETE> about as meaningful a solution as hanging up on a collect telephone call after you have been forced to accept the charges.

Won't the spammers just go offshore?

It is true that many laws can't effectively reach people who are operating completely outside the country, there are two things to remember:

First, because most spam advertises goods or services offered by North American-based entities (for example, get-rich-quick schemes and quack medical remedies being sold out of someones basement), we advocate anti-spam laws in which the focus is not where the email came from but on whose behalf the spam was sent. If the law applies to the advertiser -- the entity profiting from the activity -- it doesn't matter where the spam originates.

Second, the reach of a law outside the borders of the country it is legislated in is tenuous at best, however that fact does not negate the need for or effectiveness of laws against those breaking them localy. It can be very difficult to bring a murderer to justice if they escape abroad, but no one could seriously argue that this fact means domestic murder laws are unnecessary or irrelevant. Spam isn't comparable to murder, but if our judicial systems means anything, the same principles of justice should apply.

Isn't stopping spam a violation of the Free speech?

Not at all. CAUCE believes in the right to free speech, but having free speech doesn't spammers the right to force others to hear their message. CAUCE does not support the outlawing of commercial speech, but CAUCE does believe that those who wish to engage in commercial speech should either bear their own costs or limit their cost-shifting to those who have overtly affirmatively expressed a willingness to bear those costs.

This is not a new concept in the law. There is an example of this style of management already practiced in the United States. This law prohibits the sending of all unsolicited advertisements via fax machines. The law has been challenged in court stating a violation of on First AmendmentFree Speech grounds and each time courts have upheld the law because it is not censorship... it's about making the advertiser bear their own costs.

When spammers try to hide their destructive and often illegal activities behind the mask of ``Free Speech``, it is helpful to remember the words of US Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin in a case called Turner Broadcasting v. FCC where the plaintiffs sought to defend their activities on First Amendment grounds:

"[They] have come to court not because their freedom of speech is seriously threatened but because their profits are; to dress up their complaints in First Amendment garb demeans the principles for which the First Amendment stands and the protections it was designed to afford."

When spammers try to cloak their damaging, often fraudulent activities in this same First Amendment garb, all defenders of free speech should be outraged. In summary, one of the best analyses of this theme comes in a famous case about junk postal mail. In the Supreme Court's decision in Rowan v. U.S. Post Office, the court held:

"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or to view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. . . We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has the right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. . . We repeat, the right of a mailer stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."

Why am I getting bounces about mail I didn't send?

Recently, there have been a lot of unsolicited bounces from ISPs which are created due to the following chain of events:

1. Spammer uses an infected computer on an ISP network (zombie) to send spam
2. Spam is sent with a forged sender address (aka. From), that is not hosted by the users ISP.
3. Spam is rejected during delivery to recipient mail server and the receiving ISP mail server generates a bounce to the original, forged sender.

Here are some possible solutions to this problem (your ISP may need to be involved to manage these recomendations):

1. Use some form of authentication on your domain; SPF, Sender ID or Domain Keys Identified Mail.
   While these solutions will not solve the bounces coming into your network, but will help ISPs checking messages supporting these solutions determine if the original messages that they are receiving (and subsequently sending a bounce to you) are from your network.
2. Implement a solution like BATV for your own messages, to help determine legitimate bounces from your network, this allows you to ignore all bounces received that do not comply with your configuration.

How do spammers get my email address?

There are many ways in which spammers can get your email address. (no order)

• From harvesting posts to UseNet, webpages, blogs, chat rooms or other easily accessed forms
• From mailing lists, contest pages or free offer sites
• Compromised websites, phishing domains or chain letter scams (i.e forward to ten friends plus this address for a free copy of <software>)
• Viruses built to harvest address books that you might be listed in
• By guessing, commonly referred to as a dictionary attack
• Buying, renting or trading email lists from each other, disgruntled employees or List Brokerage companies
• By scanning domain registration contact information listed in whois
• Using social engineering to acquire information
• Internet directories, profile pages and social networking sites
• From a previous owner of a recycled email address

How do you define "spam"?

The definition of "spam" is a tricky issue. The Wikipedia defines spam as "e-mail that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients." Others believe "bulkiness" is irrelevant, it's merely a matter of whether the message was sent with the consent or knowledge of the recipient. Many other debates center around the content of the message and weather bulk is relevant to the commercial content of the message.

Due to the nature of Internet email technology, each email message, whether it is bulk or not, whether it is solicited or not, whether it is commercial or not, costs the recipient more than it costs the sender in terms of both money and resources. These are facts that make the definition of spam very tricky and lead to several differing view points on this topic.

As the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, we believe the largest and most pressing problem is unsolicited commercial email (UCE). This decision is mostly one of political necessity: there is substantial concern raised by proposals that could affect non-commercial speech. While many of us believe there is a strong legal case to be made for treating non-commercial spam (such as political or religious spam) no differently, today's US Congress simply does not have the political will to go after those who cannot be shown to be subsidizing their commercial activities on the unwilling backs of others. This is not to say that unsolicited email of any content, sent once or in bulk, isn't a part of the spam issue as a whole. CAUCE has simply chosen to limit our efforts to UCE. Thus, CAUCE has chosen to cut off one slice of the spam problem and address it first, however this does not imply that other forms of email abuse will be ignored or avoided.

The United States Government divided email, in the CAN-SPAM act of 2003, into two classes; Commercial email and Transactional email. These are defined as something that a reasonable consumer would understand to be selling or marketing a product (ex: Up-sell or new product information) and something that is offering a transactional response (ex: billing receipt, support ticket)

How do you pronounce 'CAUCE'?

It rhymes with "sauce". The first "C" is hard, and is spoken like the "K" in "Kangaroo"; the second "C" is soft, and is spoken like the "S" in "Stop Spam".