ISP Chief: Spam Is 'A Thousand Times More Horrible Than You Can Imagine'
By Mitch Wagner
Go on. Ask Barry Shein about spam. But be prepared for an earful.
Shein is president of The World, a small, 10,000-user Internet service
provider in Boston. Founded in 1989, The World was the first dial-up
Internet service provider in the world, Shein said. It has survived
competition from the telecoms and weathered the dot-com meltdown, but Shein
is worried that it won't survive spam.
"Spam is a thousand times more horrible than you can ever imagine," Shein
said. "The entire Internet mail system is under a denial-of-service attack."
The World is my personal ISP; I contacted Shein recently about recent
problems I've been having with people's e-mails bouncing when they tried to
send to me. I surmised, correctly, that the e-mails were bouncing because
of the spam blacklists that The World has in place. I called The World's
tech support and the guy at the help desk couldn't do anything for me. So I
decided to call Shein directly. He's a friend of mine, I've quoted him many
times over the years and we've had dinner a few times.
One of the reasons I use The World as an ISP is for its great tech support.
(Also, Barry doesn't charge me for the account. But actually that doesn't
weigh into my choice of ISP - if the service was bad, I wouldn't use an ISP
even if they paid me.) So I was surprised by Shein's attitude toward my
problem. He just didn't care.
"We're completely under attack! There are bullets flying past our ears, and
you're complaining to me about a hangnail!" Shein said.
I tried to get in a question, but Shein was angry and on a roll.
"They're taking down the entire Internet. This can't go on. People are in
deep denial, but it's completely collapsing before your very eyes," Shein
said.
While some disagree with Shein's dire predictions, saying the problem will
eventually be solved, e-mail watchers are in agreement that spam is a crisis.
Matt Cain, an analyst with the Meta Group, said technology will likely
solve the spam problem before it takes down Internet e-mail. But, for now,
the crisis is on; 40 percent of e-mail that comes in to enterprises from
the Internet is spam, Cain said.
"There's widespread panic out there," Cain said. "There is no question in
my mind that the number-one issue for e-mail managers today is blocking spam."
Enterprises spend about $20 per user per year fighting spam; that's about
10 percent of the overall e-mail budget for running Microsoft Exchange,
Cain said.
Bruce Schneier, founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, agreed
with Shein's dire prediction for the future. He said Internet e-mail won't
go away, but the current economic model -- where we pay a relatively small
charge for an Internet connection, which includes, at no extra charge, all
the e-mail we can send and receive -- will be replaced by e-mail tariffs.
"The incremental cost of sending one more piece of e-mail is free,"
Schneier said. "Because the cost of sending a million pieces of e-mail is
essentially the same as sending a dozen, spammers can make money."
End users frequently belittle the spam problem, saying it's just a nuisance.
One reader responding to our spam poll said, "Has junk mail made the U.S.
Postal service obsolete? Has your ATM card really made your checkbook
obsolete? Nah! Get off your duff and implement one of the many vendors'
anti-spam solutions, and/or program your e-mail reader with some
rules-based filtering, and get back to work! There's more important things
in life to worry about. Sheesh!"
Said another: "Sure, spam is annoying. But a bit of perspective here -- so
are telephone solicitors. And junk surface mail. And continuous
commercials. And marketing in our schools. We learn to live with it and
deal. We will do the same with spam ... unless society makes the decision
that we will not permit advertising to pervade every corner of our lives,
that our free time is not to be auctioned to the highest bidder, and that
we are willing to pay the real costs of our technologies and media, not
hiding those costs in advertising, we will continue to be inundated with
spam in all its various forms."
But Shein said the belittlers who compare spam to obnoxious television
commercials are missing the point. TV commercials and other conventional
advertisers pay for the programming that carries their ads. Even surface
junkmail is paid for by the sender -- indeed, surface junkmail subsidizes
some of the cost of sending a First Class letter. But ISPs and enterprises
aren't paid for carrying spam, indeed, the spammers steal resources from
ISPs and enterprises to send their messages. The real cost of spam is not
borne by the end-user, who utters a choice curse word, hits the delete key,
and moves on. The real cost is borne by enterprises and Internet service
providers, like his company, that need to pay for increased bandwidth,
server capacity, and -- especially -- staff to block spam and field
help-desk complaints from users who don't understand that the spam isn't
coming from Shein, and there's very little he can do about it.Shein
estimates that about 30 percent of staff expenses at his 20-person company
is now spent either putting in spam filters, or talking to customers on the
phone about spam, or about false positives -- legitimate e-mail that gets
erroneously tagged as spam and blocked.
He said he is frequently up until 3 a.m. himself putting in spam blocks and
spends about four hours every day on spam issues.
As for my problem with missing e-mail? "The one thing I won't do is spend a
remaining minute of our time talking about false positives. If we all go
down in blazes, I don't care any more," Shein said.
He said the big multinational Internet service providers and telecoms are
experiencing the same problems as his company, but won't discuss them
because it would be bad for public relations.
"E-mail is the Waterloo of the Internet, it is a failure, and it is a total
tragedy of the commons. It is on the verge of total collapse. Not until
people get their heads out of the sand and start admitting to the problem
will anything get done," he said.
Shein said he believes much of what's labeled as spam is, in fact, a
denial-of-service attack. He even speculates that the motive behind spam
isn't advertising and profit -- it's cyberterrorism. "It seems like an
organized, vicious, sociopathic thing, done by someone who just hates this
society," he said.
http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNews/INW20021219S0003
UBL phone home.
http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNews/INW20021219S0007
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