Cleaning up e-mail: an end to spam?THANKS TO THE ingenious CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003) A U.S. statute effective January 1, 2004 that allows spammers to be fined up to $6 million. Act passed by Congress last year, junk e-mail See spam. in the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. has been drastically reduced, rendering many inboxes completely spam free. Just kidding. Despite the new law, spam continues to increase, and recent studies by makers of anti-spam software found that less than 10 percent of junk e-mail complies with CAN-SPAM. Fortunately, Congress isn't the only group working on the spam problem. The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance (ASTA) is a coalition of some of the largest e-mail providers on the Internet, including Microsoft, AOL (A division of Time Warner, Inc., New York, NY, www.aol.com) The world's largest online information service with access to the Internet, e-mail, chat rooms and a variety of databases and services. , Yahoo!, and Earthlink. In late June it published some proposals designed to slow the onslaught. Most of the recommendations consist of practices the alliance hopes Internet providers will adopt voluntarily, such as closing mail servers to nonsubscribers and limiting the number of messages per day each user can send. But the most promising suggestion is the anti-forgery technology ASTA members are developing. The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) The standard e-mail protocol on the Internet and part of the TCP/IP protocol suite, as defined by IETF RFC 2821. SMTP defines the message format and the message transfer agent (MTA), which stores and forwards the mail. protocol, used for sending and receiving e-mail, has no built-in way to authenticate senders. Spammers use this weakness to hide their identities and send mail that looks like it's coming from somewhere else. CAN-SPAM makes this illegal, but the law is almost universally ignored. ASTA hopes to create methods to digitally sign content and make this kind of "spoofing (1) Faking the sending address of a transmission in order to gain illegal entry into a secure system. See e-mail spoofing. (2) Creating fake responses or signals in order to keep a session active and prevent timeouts. " not just illegal but technologically impossible. If that works, it might finally be possible to make some headway in the battle against junk e-mail. |
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