Spam: Problem Without a Clear Solution

Despite last week’s widely discussed announcement of AOL’s success with new anti-Spam measures, the company’s general counsel Chuck Curran opened his remarks at DoubleClick’s Insight conference yesterday with, “Unfortunately, I’m here to report that AOL is facing a Spam crisis. The problem has intensified to a staggering level.”

Curran, addressing an audience of several hundred online media professionals assembled in New York’s Hyatt hotel, said that AOL blocks nearly 750 million emails daily, and that the count is fast approaching the billion mark. “Overall, Spam volume is doubling in less than 6-month increments,” he said.

“This is a shared crisis for both senders and ISP,” he said, painting a gloomy picture with statistics, citing that Spam is the company’s #1 member complaint, with nearly 5 million Spam complaints logged daily.

“The consumers’ mailbox is being overrun. Mail isn’t being read. Trust in the medium is being diminished. A public backlash is developing for DRASTIC responses by both ISPs and legislators,” he lamented.

Curran didn’t stop there. He offered some solutions.

“I would hope at this point this is common sense,” he said, asking the audience for individual sender/advertiser accountability. Sender opt-in/out-out mechanisms, refraining from abusing previously obtained permissions and other people’s email lists and reducing unnecessary volume and frequency of email being sent are parts of the answer, he suggested.

Collectively, he said, the industry needs to be “more aggressive” in developing ways to solve the Spam crisis and “recognize that consumers are the ultimate judges of acceptable mailing practices.”

Can that crisis be solved?

DoubleClick’s Chief Privacy Officer Bennie Smith stepped in with more answers, focusing first on legislative issues. He reported that the state of Minnesota yesterday passed an anti-Spam bill and Texas put a similar bill forth for consideration, bringing the total up to 25 states that have already passed or are about to pass anti-Spam legislation. All this is leading up to intervention on a federal level, he said.

However, “there’s no magic bullet to solve the problem,” he said, suggesting that advertisers take matters into their own hands for now, by seriously evaluating the volume and content of email, and well as “hygiene of email lists” to avoid being blacklisted by ISPs.

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