End Of Email - 4th Quarter 2006

Greetings,

This is the time of year that we often reflect back and count our blessings. I was speaking with somebody the other day and made the comment that Clearbuilt has great clients. It occurs to me what a blessing that is. For all of you on this notification list that are clients…we’d like to sincerely thank you. I enjoy working with all of you and getting to know many of you closely.

It is the holiday season and many of us have already overeaten. However, we must talk about spam again. Not leftovers from last year’s ClearPoint on spam. Instead, I’m going to reveal the root of the spam problem and how we can take a huge bite out of it.

Enjoy the holidays and best wishes for 2007!

Neal

Is This The End Of Email?

I never thought I’d say this, but please join me here…I HATE EMAIL!

I’m remembering back to 1994 when we were getting started. We worked hard to convince everyone we encountered to use email. There were several years where I’d get an email from somebody and 2 minutes later, ugh, they would call to see if I got the email. Then we all became comfortable and email was preferred by most.

Now we are back where we started. Spam has absolutely spoiled email (sorry, no more tasteless puns, I promise). I find myself sending an email and calling to see if it arrived. What’s worse? Often times it hasn’t!

It Is Bad…Really Bad

What would you estimate the percentage of emails received by the average person is spam? 25%? 40%? Maybe half? According to MessageLabs, the percentage for the month of November 2006 was 74% and climbing. Just 7 months prior it was 57.9%. At this
rate is will be over 100% in less than a year! Just kidding, but how high can it go?

Bill Gates Solves Spam "Two years from now, spam will be solved," Bill Gates, 2004 (read the CBS News article)

Missing Any Email Lately?

“I sent you an email on that last week. You didn’t get it?” Does this sound familiar?

If your email is serviced by any of the big Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or free email services, then you are likely not receiving all of your legitimate emails. I can guarantee that if you use Yahoo Mail, then you are missing emails (here is a highly technical article explaining the situation). Many providers recently are even having trouble sending email. Any Bellsouth.net users out there? They are starting to crumble under the relentless spam load, and delivery times for outgoing mail is sometimes up to 24 hours.

An Example: Earthlink Is Losing Your Emails "Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn’t bounced back to senders; it just disappears." From: I, Cringely, December 1 (read the article)

What’s Gone Wrong?

Money…the root of all evil. Spammers have become highly skilled and are not using their powers for good. They have expanded their businesses to not only make money by collecting, qualifying, and selling email addresses. They are now creating viruses that allow them to use the computers of unsuspecting, innocent people like you.

Spam and Viruses

The spammers need a way to send their spam. The easy methods of sending spams are now being blocked. So spammers are writing viruses that install on victim computers that can be used for:

Is There A Solution?

I want my email back! It gives me a written record of communication, it allows me to respond when I have time, it even hits me on the hip when I’m away from the office. People Unite. We must FIGHT BACK!

Sure, you can report spam to your ISP, the government, and more. You can lobby for new laws (there are still 3 states that do not have spam laws). You can filter filter filter. But do you really want to help? Here’s how.

The number 1 thing we can do to reduce spam is to make sure our computers have not been hijacked. It is not easy to do because the goal of the infecting program is to be undetectable. To accomplish this the spammers use Rootkits. (Note to self: no puns about Rootkits being the root of the problem.) Sadly, there is an array of websites out there to educate spammers on how to build RootKits.

I know many of you are ready to jump off for fear that I’m going to launch into some technical mumbo jumbo. Let me just leave you with this. The windows operating system is not the only operating system vulnerable to attack, but it is the most common. If we could clean up the Windows machines, then spam as it is today would no longer work. Here’s a great article by Microsoft that explains what you can do. They even provide a very small software download that you can run to check to see if you are infected.

www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/RootkitRevealer.mspx

Conclusion

In my 2005 ClearPoint I said it was going to get worse before it gets better. It’s worse. It’s way worse. It sickens me to think of all the time spent deleting that 74% of my emails (which number over 2000 per day for me). Unlike Elvis, that time is gone forever.

I do believe that the tide will start to turn on spam and we’ll see great efforts in 2007. I hope that in a year or two we’ll reap the benefits, but I’m not going to make any firm predictions in writing, I’ll leave that to Bill Gates. Until then, do what you can to make sure you are not part of the problem.

Filed by nb on December 26th, 2006 under ClearPoint