Wanted: A Leader in the Battle Against Spam
Fortunately, that's not entirely true. A small but growing community of people is working hard to help email administrators stem the flow of incoming spam.
Tom Geller is one of those people. As executive director of SpamCon Foundation, Geller has been a solider in the war against spam for the past three years and he's ready for a break. While he's not leaving the field completely, he's stepping down from his position, hoping to stay active in the organization while passing the baton to someone who will bring a fresh set of ideas.
Geller was instrumental in creating the organization which has served as a clearinghouse for helping ISPs, email system administrators and end users challenge the flow of unwanted incoming email. Its goal was to help put people in touch with the tools they needed.
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NewvineGeller's involvement with the anti-spam crusade began three years ago, when he got irritated enough by what he saw in his inbox that he started to reach out to others. He saw a need and started an online group called SueSpammers.org. The group's goal was to encourage people to use the legal system as a defense against spam. Combining the roles of educator and organizer, Geller built a website, gathered the facts about state laws covering email, and coordinated the flow of information among the group's members.
In October 1999, the group had success, winning the then much-coveted Yahoo! Cool Pick of the Day citation. Before long, there were newspaper articles, and TV appearances for Geller. Pretty soon, the people who got to know each so well online decided to meet and so the group had a conference.
Significant Progress Seen In Spam Wars
Out of that meeting came SpamCon Foundation, established as a California non-profit corporation with Geller as executive director. The position has never been lucrative; Geller says the annual budget is "in the low four figures." But it was compatible with his full-time job in public relations, which at various times had Geller working on the accounts of Qualcomm, Sun Microsystems and Brightmail.
As Geller steps down, he maintains there has been significant progress. ISPs almost without exception now maintain an abuse department and they're quick to cancel the account of anyone caught sending out spam. That has made an impact but it has clearly not put an end to unwanted email, and that's why organizations like SpamCon are still needed. The crusade to bring spam under control requires more education and more outreach.
"If you're on the abuse list at an ISP, you get a lot of bogus complaints," Geller explains. "People don't understand the headers (when they receive a spam message). They assume that the 'from' address is correct and that's usually not true because it is usually forged."
Most spammers use relay servers, bouncing their messages off an unprotected public server in order to disguise the source of the unwanted email. This can lead some corporate server administrators, who react to the server listed in the "from" address, to decide that all email from an ISP's domain should be banned.
But if the spammer was successfully hiding their originating server, all the ban accomplishes is to prevent the company's employees from receiving legitimate e-mail coming from that ISP's users. Meanwhile the spammer has probably already switched to a different relay server, and continues without missing a beat.
One of SpamCon's contributions is publishing guidelines like "I got spam! What can I do!", publicizing black-hole lists and other resources at its Web site. Continuing the legacy of its earlier days, the foundation's underlying philosophy is, when all else fails, use the legal system.
Geller believes a good deal of the progress against spammers stems from victories ISPs have won in lawsuits where they have affirmed their right to deny service to spammers. He maintains that few spammers will be able to stay in business for anything longer than a short career.
"No longer will an ISP let a spammer stay on their network," Geller says. "Not only do they cut off a spammer's access but they look at their Radius logs and say we aren't gong to take any more calls from this phone number, so they can't use their own phone to dial in."
He says it's still relatively easy to shoot off 10,000 unsolicited messages, "but it's getting really hard to shoot off a million. The only way you can do it is if you are a professional criminal, and the legal system knows how to deal with professional criminals."
Direct Marketers Backing Off
So why are corporate black-hole lists still on the rise and inboxes still choking with unwanted email?
"Even in the year 2002, there are many companies that are just starting to use email for direct marketing," he explains. "The biggest thing to happen in the last two years is that marketers are realizing the damage that spam is doing to their business. It was only a year ago that the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) said, 'Spam everyone you want as long as you take them out when they ask.' They're now saying, 'Send it only to people who ask for it,' and that's a big change."
Such positive signs don't mean Geller believes it's time to declare victory. He believes the use of email for corporate communications is still in its infancy. The challenge for the immediate future is to help establish "best practices" so business can improve its use of the medium in reaching customers and corporations can stop spending on the resources need to block unwanted email.
So why is Geller stepping down? He says it's time to give the organization a change of leadership. "I'm a startup kind of guy, and I know that others have the skills needed to get the Foundation to "the next level."
The part-time position doesn't come with many perks, or a salary. Your reward is a good measure of net fame and the satisifaction of fighting for a popular cause. If you ask Tom if he's do again, he doesn't hesitate. "I'd jump on it."
Hear Tom Geller and a panel of spam experts discuss "Spam, Permission and Privacy" at the ClickZ Email Strategies Seminar on May 2 in New York City.
Gus Venditto is editor-in-chief of internet.com.
