• by David L. Smith , November 4, 2002

Last summer, I wrote a piece for the Online Spin entitled Send Me Your Stories where I asked readers to forward their “worst practices” involving Internet Web advertising and marketing. The response was overwhelming. That, plus a (fortunately) busy workload since Labor Day, has prevented me from compiling all of the data and getting it in shape for an article or series of articles. But I will, real soon now.

It is clear that the readers felt that the #1 issue is Spam. Email marketing is arguably the most effective means of marketing over the Internet. That’s one of the issues. It is so effective AND inexpensive that the profiteers abound. Some do so quite legitimately with the 80-100MM names available out there for sale by a number of different vendors. I read a story last week about a guy who sends out 80 million emails twice a month for an insurance company to generate leads for them and turns $14,000 every time he does it. So obviously, some people do not feel that Spam is wrong, per se. Others use the opt-in practice loosely, with a pre-checked form and no attempt to verify their interest (double opt-in).

It is equally clear that, good or bad, this practice cannot be stopped any more than we can stop people from generating virus attacks. You cannot legislate against it as an increasing amount of Spam comes from overseas, with China and Russia being two of the most prolific locations of late. Establishing “standards” does no good as the companies who generate Spam are generally not in the profile of companies who would join and support the industry organizations adopting the standards.

So if we treat it like a virus, with a software solution, we will be better off. There are a number of software vendors with a number of different kinds of solutions. Many of the commercial ones appear to be based on known Spam sending email addresses. This only works to some degree. If you have tried to fight Spam or even respond to the “opt-out” link and failed, you quickly realize that many of the email addresses used to send Spam are one time use only and non-working addresses shortly after you get the Spam.

A company called Cloudmark has come up with a simple solution that not only catches email, it permits the user to mark emails as Spam and add to the collective knowledge base. This distributed power is what the Internet is all about. Now I don’t have any interest in you using this product, I just think that it or something like this has got to be the answer.

Here’s how it works: Right now, if you have Outlook, you can download SpamNet from www.cloudmark.com and install it in minutes for free (it is in beta). Versions for other email clients will be coming soon. Once you have installed it, it looks at the body of the email rather than the addressee. (How many times have you gotten the same piece of Spam from different email addresses?) It compares the body of each email you get to their database and, if a critical mass of their users have marked it as Spam, it goes into your Spam inbox that the program created. Nothing is deleted. You can go to that inbox and unblock any piece of email (what is Spam to others may not be to you). If a piece of what you regard as Spam slips into your email inbox, vote with your keyboard. Just hit the block icon and it goes into your Spam inbox AND into the SpamNet database at Cloudmark. Like that popular restaurant guide, Zagats, the “collective” votes.

Apparently, there is a “Karma score” attached to each user, based on their propensity to vote with the majority. So, if your vote on Spam generally agrees with others, your vote counts for more. At some point, enough votes are collected that the piece is marked as Spam. As of today, there are 164,343 active users of this product. Not much. But as it gains a critical mass of users, the power of the collective takes over and spammers get blocked from more and more in boxes. The beauty of this is that, besides it being an effective product, your use of it grows the knowledge base of known Spam and it helps others. You become part of the solution by using a product like SpamNet.

If there are other products out there like this, they should be publicized. Maybe they can combine their databases for the collective good. And yes, it was Eldridge Cleaver, who said, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” Start using SpamNet or a product like it and contribute to the solution rather than complain about Spam because, unfortunately, Spam is here to stay.