Spam vs. spam

The only way to stem the flood of unwanted e-mail may be to harness a million eyeballs and an army of open-source hackers.

By Andrew Leonard

Jun 24, 2002 | The World Birthday Web is back!

Last August, I wrote a melancholy column bemoaning the death of the World Birthday Web, programmer Thomas Boutell's effort to spread a little birthday cheer via the Internet. For six years, on the date of my birthday, I had been receiving a passel of e-mailed greetings from strangers simply because my birth date was included in the World Birthday Web. But last year the birthday greetings dried up. Spammer abuse of the Birthday Web database forced Boutell to shut down the site.

In May of this year, Boutell e-mailed former participants in the World Birthday Web and invited them to sign back up. He had devised a combination of encryption and HTML trickery that he hoped would defeat the spammers.

It remains to be seen whether Boutell's fix will work permanently -- as of mid-June, he reported 2,000 returnees, a far cry from the 200,000 participants the site boasted at the height of its glory. Spammers are nothing if not resourceful. Indeed, the amount of spam generated by abusers of the World Birthday Web, at its worst, would now amount to a hardly noticeable trickle in the flood that sweeps across the Net every day. Every measurement I've been able to find tells the same sad story: Not only has the volume of spam steadily risen every year since the Internet became a mainstream phenomenon, but the rate of growth also appears to be accelerating. All the year-by-year graphs show pretty much the same upward curve -- and sometime during the year 2000, the line starts pointing nearly straight up.

But Boutell's happy news came at the same time that system administrators in my office brought a new, and successful, weapon to bear in the fight against spam on our own servers at Salon and the Well: SpamAssassin, an open-source filtering engine that cleverly differentiates between legitimate and junk e-mail. You can't keep a good technologist down -- if spammers are indefatigable, so are anti-spam geeks.

For those of us who get hundreds of spam e-mails a day, SpamAssassin is heaven-sent. SpamAssassin labels the e-mail it thinks is spam, and individual users can then shunt the garbage off into its own quarantined mailbox. Once or twice a day, I check to see that no "false positives" have been misdirected. Life, post-SpamAssassin, is definitely better.

Salon isn't alone in appreciating SpamAssassin. Although currently targeted at Unix users, SpamAssassin has boomed in popularity over the past four months. Craig Hughes, a significant code contributor to the project and the founder of Deersoft, a start-up that will offer a commercial version of SpamAssassin that Windows users can harness to their Outlook programs, says that in March, SpamAssassin registered a total of 2,000 downloads. In April and May, the number jumped to 30,000.

As the Wall Street Journal reported last Wednesday, an increasing number of start-ups are rushing to market with various spam-fighting technologies. Where there's a plague, there's a market opportunity. The Journal didn't mention Deersoft or SpamAssassin. That may turn out to be a mistake. SpamAssassin, by virtue of its nature as an open-source project, may have a leg up on its competitors. Spam is like a hydra: It needs a multiheaded opponent to give it a serious battle.

Next Page: Sysadmins on the warpath -- "These people are tigers!"

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