The Problem
Almost everybody gets them. Messages advertising stock market tips, office supplies and pornographic sites or promising easy money or miracle cures. Messages warning of dire consequences or lost fortunes if the messages aren't forwarded to everyone we know. Scams attempting to fool victims to typing banking information and passwords into fake web sites. They're a nuisance, wasting our time and computing resources. Some are shocking, others are fraudulent and illegal.
Unfortunately, they are also a fact of life on today's Internet. 600 million people have the ability to send us messages. Anonymity and instant, worldwide communications combined with our desire to be reachable make it impossible to prevent. Anyone can connect a computer to the Internet and send messages. Public computers abound. Unsafely operated computers are abundant and easily used by criminals.
Laws are spotty and hard to enforce. Our e-mail system attempts to discriminate between wanted and unwanted messages. Its doubtful that a person could do this this with 100% accuracy. For a machine its impossible. If the machines are configured to be stricter, the chances of losing legitimate messages increase. At peak times, our email system blocks an average of over 240 messages per minute that it has classified as SPAM and thousands of messages per hour that carry viruses.
Criminals are moving to instant messaging to spread their crimes and trash as we get better at thwarting them with e-mail technology. Criminals and marketers are increasingly using the Internet. Oftentimes, they use virus infected home computers and/or computers in other countries to send the stuff making it easy for them to avoid blocks and prosecution. Various sources estimate that unwanted messages constitute anywhere from 60% to 80% of all Internet e-mail and that the average person receives anywhere from half a dozen to two dozen messages daily. In the first half of 2005, 5.7 million fraudulent "phishing" messages alone were detected *PER DAY*.
There has been a large increase in this type of mail the past several months and it is expected to continue. We continue to evaluate our email system for improvements. Buying new anti-spam solutions would require a complete rebuild of our email system and, as yet, there is no guarantee that it would improve the situation.
There are a variety of schemes being planned that depend upon partial authentication of senders to allow receiving e-mail servers to make decisions. All these schemes depend a lot on the participation of the majority of Internet e-mail senders and are vulnerable to the use of compromised computers within a domain which is more and more common through the use of 'BOTS'.