Mailinator
I love this service.
Mailinator
Get enough SPAM lately? Have you ever gone to a website that asks for your email address for no reason (other than they are going to sell it to the highest bidder so you get spam forever)?
Welcome to Mailinator(tm) - Its no signup, instant anti-spam service. Here is how it works: You are on the web, at a party, or talking to your favorite insurance salesman. Whereever you are, someone (or some webpage) asks for your email. You know if you give it, you're gambling with your privacy. On the other hand, you do want at least one message from that person. The answer is to give them a mailinator address. You don't need to sign-up. You just make it up on the spot. Pick jonesy@mailinator.com or bipster@mailinator.com - pick anything you want (up to 15 characters before the @ sign).
Later, come to this site and check that account. Its that easy. Mailinator accounts are created when mail arrives for them. No signup, no personal information, and when you're done - you can walk away - an instant solution to one way spammers get your address. Its an anti-spam solution for everyone. The messages are automatically deleted for you after a few hours.
Let'em spam.
So for now on, everywhere I have to confirm my identity -- like when I am fiddling around with social networking tools, or signing up to get access to an online newsletter -- I will spawn a new Mailinator account.
This will lead to a serious reduction in email to my inbox, I hope.
There are interesting ramifications: I am avoiding the possibility of a single unifying identity (the "stoweboyd@persistent_until_death_domain.com") that people can use to find me right up to the funeral. So be it. I'm not sure how well I like the single identity concept anyway.
[pointer from Wired]
42% of Small Businesses Consider Dropping Email
Despite all the headshaking by the cognoscenti at the recent Supernova about my "Just Say 'No' To Email" stance (see earlier piece), today's USA Today has a story about the extreme lengths that businesses are considering as a result of spam. And a lot of businesses are willing to consider giving up email altogether, according to a Symantec survey conducted last December:
[from Symantec Survey Finds Small Businesses Fed Up with Spam, Willing to Take Action]The survey found that small businesses are seeing a noticeable increase in spam in their inboxes. More than half (64 percent) of respondents reported an increase in spam over the past six months, with 33 percent noting dramatic increases. Nearly 40 percent of respondents said that spam made up more than half of the email coming into their businesses.
Small businesses are also willing to take steps to reduce their exposure to spam should the problem continue, according to the survey. For example, 42 percent of small businesses said they would consider abandoning email for business correspondence if the spam situation worsened. [Emphasis mine] Fifty-five percent reportedly would consider changing their company email addresses to stop spam. Moreover, 56 percent would consider locking down their email server to allow only approved messages, which would also force all users who wanted to correspond with the company via email to go through an approval process first. Thirty-two percent of respondents already invest the time and resources to help curb spam by submitting spam email addresses to blacklist companies.
If we lock down the openness of email -- which is one of its purported benefits -- and switch over to a registration model, we are in essence creating a gated community model -- which is what IM already offers.
I say that we should just be like the teenagers, and switch to IM.
$t0pp^ng $p@m!!
I came across a thoughtful and well-reasoned argument about email spam, and our inability to counter it with legal and technical responses. But, in the final analysis, it was like reading about the workings of a disease organism that we haven't got a cure for. The only solution? Don't catch the disease in the first place.
Paul Jamieson[from Legal Affairs - $t0pp^ng $p@m!!] Legitimate businesses that use e-mail as a marketing tool support spam reform because their communications are often lost in the avalanche. Consumers and businesses that rely on e-mail for transactions and communication overwhelmingly dislike spam for the same reason and make their displeasure known to elected officials. Internet service providers, or ISPs, such as Yahoo and Earthlink, oppose it because junk e-mail taxes their networks.Nevertheless, five months after the effective date of a sweeping federal law imposing stiff civil and criminal penalties on spammers, well over half of all e-mail is still spam. There is just as much if not more spam now than there was before the legal barriers were erected. What gives?
The short answer is that legal measures may be largely powerless to affect the spam problem because the architecture of e-mail is resistant to traditional methods of government regulation.
Email is 80% Spam in U.S.
I was reading the technology newswire at SuicideGirls (proof that I read the articles there), and saw that MessageLabs has announced that 80% of all U.S. email is now spam.
Bob Sullivan[from MSNBC]The firm tracks virus and spam volume by filtering every e-mail destined for its 8,500 customers, and checking it for spam or viruses.
"Twelve months ago we were just about to pass that 50 percent mark [internationally]. No one thought it could keep up that pace of increase, but it has," said Brian Czarny, vice president of marketing at Message Labs.
He made an even more sober prediction: "In terms of what we could in a year, we could see percentages in the upper 90s," he said.
Postini Inc. uses similar technology, scanning some 200 million e-mails each day, and announced similar results at a Congressional hearing on spam held yesterday. According to the firm, 83 percent of the e-mails it filtered last month for its mostly U.S.-based clients was spam. That was up from 78 percent in January, when the new anti-spam federal law, the CAN-SPAM Act, took effect.
I was supposed to speak at the INBOX conference later this week (I have been trapped by jury duty, so I can't go) on the "Is Email Dead?" panel. Well, duh.
I really would like to completely switch over to IM, and treat email like I do postal mail, where I already expect 90% crap.
SPIM Stats
A collection of stats on SPIM and IM growth:
Higher numbers for SPIM than I have seen before, but the term has started to be used for various sorts of malware that find their way behind the firewall through IM file transfer, not just hustlers in chat rooms.Marty Schultz[from How to stop IM and SPIM abuse - News - ZDNet]About 70 percent of all organizations used instant messaging by the end of 2003, according to market research firm Gartner Inc. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2005, instant messaging will surpass e-mail as the primary way people interact electronically.
All this IM growth is spawning rapid proliferation of SPIM, or spam through instant messaging. According to Ferris Research, more than 4 billion SPIM messages--will be sent in 2004. That's up 100 percent from 2003. The Yankee Group estimates that 5 percent to 8 percent of corporate IMs are SPIM.
Note: Marty goes on to make a number of pronouncements about IM use, most of which I profoundly disagree with.
"The final step in solidifying your organization against SPIM-based viruses is to centralize, archive and virus check all files being transmitted through Instant Messaging. [Ok] While there are several ways to accomplish this, most organizations have found that prohibiting files from being transmitted through Instant Messaging is the most reliable. The alternative, sending a file over e-mail, is just as convenient and easy as sending the file over Instant Messaging [no it's not]. Most IM management products provide a feature to prohibit files from being transmitted.
Snam
Ouch. Scott Kirsner at Fast Company reports on the appearance of a new term: "Snam."
Got it.Scott Kirsner[from Networking Overload]I don't know Kenneth Norton, but he's a mere two degrees of separation from me. Norton is director of product management at Yahoo, and he has coined one of the best new words of 2004. The word is "snam."
Everyone knows what spam is--unwanted email. Snam is a mutant variant. It's unwanted email generated by such "social networking" Web sites as Friendster, LinkedIn, and Tribe. Social networking . . . snam? Get it?
I've written several times about social network spam, although I wasn't Czechoslovakian enough to call it snam. And I don't limit it to the unwanted email generated by such systems. I include other stuff that gums up the works:
- The guy who posts what smells like blog spam (sbam?) at social networking profiles
- those that use every available contact as a means to hawk their companies' good and services (or is that the purpose of the sites, anyway?)
- those who subvert the network routing algorithms by amassing the largest networks as a means of charging 'fees' for introductions passing through them(is that legal? or is it just consulting on how to effectively exploit social networking?)
At any rate, perhaps any effective use of social networking for business will have to generate some sort of pellet-sized business proposition that will smell like snam. And it isn't restrincted to the email path, but all the mechanisms of communication that become channels for social networking systems.
Spim on the Rise
A recent piece in New Scientist digs into the drivers and headaches around spim -- instant messaging spam:
"The volume of so-called "spim" is set [to] triple in 2004, according to a new report from the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm in Palo Alto, California.Yikes.The company projects that 1.2 billion spims will be sent, 70 per cent of which are porn-related. This is a mere trickle compared to the 35 billion spams expected, but the researchers warn that spim is growing at about three times the rate of spam, as spammers adapt their toolkit to exploit a rapidly rising number of new instant messaging (IM) users."
A great reason to tighten the controls that IM already offers us. This is also a great argument for enterprises to bring on instant messaging management offerings from firms like IMlogic, Facetime, Akonix, and ZoneLabs, that will block spim before it gets to your IM client.
This does not necessarily block pornbots encountered in public chat rooms, however:
"Another spimming tool is even more stealthy. Spimmers deploy bots in chatrooms that pose as people and persuade other chatters to invite them on to their buddy lists. In a crowded chatroom, an invitation can be solicited with a fairly rudimentary impersonation, says Stowe Boyd of the technology consulting firm A Working Model in Virginia."
Mobile Spam
Reuters reports that mobile spam is becoming a real headache in Europe:
"London-based technology firm Empower Interactive said 65 percent of Europe's mobile phone users report receiving up to five unsolicited text messages a week on their handsets."We are certainly going to see a significant acceleration in the coming years," said Richard Shearer, CEO of Empower Interactive."
More is Different: Social Search
Bambi Francisco writes about Spoke Software's newly announced social search technology, and what she saw kind of freaked her out.
"Spoke, one of the rising social-networking upstarts which has raised more than $20 million in venture financing, is attempting to make the search process, or at least the searching-for-people process, more personalized and relevant.Spoke is harnessing public data about people, just like I might if I was considering hiring Bambi for a job. But the ease with which it can be done is unsetlling, just like the experience of seeing a Google map showing your home by simply providing your phone number.By organizing information based on social networks drawn from members' address books and the people they communicate with through e-mails (and instant messaging in the future, I'm told), Spoke improves upon the average search engine's results. That's the cool part.
On the other hand, the data it pulls together includes information about millions of people who are not members and suggests a dark underside to search precision.
For instance, I haven't joined the Spoke service, yet I became one of the 13 million searchable people in Spoke's public network.
My profile on Spoke included a resume, notes about me, and a list of people who may know how to contact me. "
This is a mild form of future shock.
New communication media are always disruptive, and are no respecters of the established order. The diffusion of email across the corporation spelled the end of middle management, and led to wholesale "rightsizing" of the enterprise. The emergence of the Internet led to the death of previous models of computing and communications. Social networking-based collaboration and communication technologies will upset other applecarts, and inevitably rewire etiquette and ethics as well.
Social networks exist in the world, and people's relatedness can be inferred from public information. I know that you sit on the board of company X, and therefore infer that you know Mike who is the CEO there. Spoke's is simply applying this logic to rank order search data.
The fact that computing power can be harnessed to accomplish this sort of inferencing in the large is what raises the hair on Bambi's neck. Yes, there is nothing stopping the uncrupulous from trying to use the power of this social inferencing to spam someone. (I am getting social spam daily, anyway, with or without social networking solutions to help, but at least with the social networking tools I can anonymously reject requests.)
But my stance is that the tools are not the issue: prosecute the spammers, create mechanisms to preclude email without proven identities, etc.
Meanwhile, I look forward to a better mechanism to sift through the 16,877 hits I can get associated with "Bambi" so I can actually get the information I need. And I promise not to spam you, Bambi.
SPIM, While Growing, Is Still Trivial
Recent research by Ferris reported suggests that while instant messaging spam, or spim, is rising, it is still inconsequential.
"Officials at America Online, which runs the popular Instant Messenger service, and Microsoft, which runs MSN Messenger, say they've seen an increase in the amount of IM spam. Messaging and collaboration research firm Ferris Research estimates that the quantity of such solicitations doubled from 2002 to 2003, reaching 500 million last year. That's fast growth, though it's nothing compared with the 800 billion pieces of E-mail spam caught by just one anti-spam provider, Brightmail Inc., in 2003. Ferris Research president David Ferris dismisses the phenomenon. "Let's say there are 200 million IM users at the moment. So 500 million is just one every three or four months. It's just trivial."Still primarily a phenomenon that arises from use of public chatrooms, where pornbots lurk for the unwary, spim will be a future hazard: when interoperability between the public IM networks lowers the costs and barriers to spimming.
Spimmers Hope for IM Interoperability
Thomas Claburn writes in InformationWeek about spim, and includes one of my thoughts about the paradoxical benefits of public IM network non-interoperability:
"Boyd also doubts that spim will ever wreak the havoc of spam. One reason is the fragmented nature of the IM networks--an AOL IM user can't talk with an MSN Messenger or Yahoo IM user. That's been a criticism of IM, but it's likely to inhibit the growth of spim. "Because the major instant-messaging networks have not worked toward any kind of public interoperability structure," he says, "it's extremely difficult to create a uniform mechanism to spim on all the networks."
But it's not impossible. Those running the IM networks are discussing greater interoperability. That could be just the incentive spimmers need."
Tim Oren's First Dubious Distinction Award of 2004
Tim Oren at Due Diligence presents his first Dubious Distinction Award of 2004 to fax.com:
"To get 2004 off to a good start, the first Dubious Distinction of the year, for continuing efforts in operating a business plan which is largely illegal, goes to fax.com. This is occasioned by the FCC levying a $5.4m fine against the company for repeated and flagrant violations of junk fax/do-not-fax regulations. Yes, before there were spammers, there was fax.com, and they are still at it, as I can attest. Pacifica's inbound fax is a known good number, and we get ads for fly-by-night insurance and refis, with the characteristic fax.com footer format. After a few, one of us gets annoyed enough to call the remove number, and they stop for a while - and then start again. This has happened enough times that it has clearly moved from incompetence to 'enemy action'. At $11,000 a pop - the fine levied by the FCC for flagrant violations - each of these could be a significant step toward bankrupting these bozos, so maybe I'll start saving them...Update: Sounds like the fax.com clowns need a RICO investigation more than fines which they ignore."
Googlemail
[Update: 29 September 2004 -- Do to the overwhelming number of comments added to this story I am adding a few notes:
]
I saw in a CNN.com article that Google is planning to roll out its own email service, to compete with Microsoft, Yahoo, and others.
"Google already knows how to deliver its sponsored link ads -- which are in the form of Web links and appear on the perimeter of Web pages -- to e-mail newsletters and content sites.Apparently, they may differentiate themeselves based on better spam protection.Furthermore, Google last year purchased an e-mail management software maker and in 2001 registered the domain name googlemail.com."
I bet they will launch their own instant messaging solution, too. Its the second most used Internet app, and in some demographics (teenagers) its number one.
I've Been Comment Spammed
It was bound to happen, I guess, but I was hoping against hope that it wouldn't. I recently got my first real comment spam. Some idiot wrote a series of vauguely pornographic comments using spurious names (Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, etc.) on an entry I recently wrote about AOL spam activities. Luckily MoveableType has IP blocking.
Ross Mayfield on Comment Spammers: Turn Off Comments
Ross offers a modest proposal to deal with comment spammers: those creeps who insert URLs in your blog that lead to porn or Viagra ads.
"So here's a solution for you. First, turn off comments. Second, do what Cory did and move your discussion to a Tribe (http://boingboing.tribe.net) [Cory notes in comments that his readers did this when they shut comments off because of spam]. This creates a social network-based whitelist for conversations. It raises the cost of commenting to registering with the service and agreeing to policies. It shifts the burden of enforcement to a third party.We really need a protocol of being admitted to the implicit community of readers after application to the author. Moving the community to Tribe.net does that, but the comments are then out of context. This is a failing of blogs, based on the lack of explicit social relationships.