Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled

Better Than Ironport

It's been a looooong time since I've posted here; I have a single post on the DHTML renaissance that's clogging up my pipeline. It is almost done, and the moment it is I'll post it here so I can catch up to May 2005 June 2005 July 2005!

In the meantime, lately I've been playing with a enterprise-grade MTA that IMHO is better than Ironport in terms of price, scalability, reliability, and most important -- flexibility: it can be scripted with Perl or PHP to connect with other systems seamlessly. Super sweet!!

I highly recommend Ecelerity as an email application server that blows the roof off IronPort at a fraction of the cost. See this comment for more information about why I'm so passionate about this product.

Thanks to the Ecelerity server, email sucks less, and that puts a big smile on my face.

If you want an intro to them, feel free to contact me.

Spamming's Lucre

MIT Technology Review:

As one of the world's most prolific spammers, Jeremy Jaynes pumped out at least 10 million e-mails a day with the help of 16 high-speed lines, the kind of Internet capacity a 1,000-employee company would need.

Jaynes' business was remarkably lucrative; prosecutors say he grossed up to $750,000 per month. If you have an e-mail account, chances are Jaynes tried to get your attention, pitching software, pornography and work-at-home schemes.

...

Relatively few people actually responded to Jaynes' pitches. In a typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out.

But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes could still pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said.

"When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there" who will be suckered in, McGuire said in an interview.  Prosecutors believe Jaynes had a net worth of up to $24 million.

...

John Levine, author of "The Internet for Dummies" and an expert witness for the prosecution in Jaynes' trial, said Jaynes was relatively unsophisticated compared to spammers who use "zombie servers" in foreign countries -- akin to "e-mail laundering" -- to hide the e-mail's true origin. Such zombies are often innocent Internet users whose computers, through a virus or other malicious code, become relays for spam.

"I was surprised at how simple his operation was," Levine said. "If he were more clever, it would have been much harder to catch him."

Jaynes' defense attorney, David Oblon, never disputed that his client was a bulk e-mail distributor. But he argued that the law was poorly crafted and that prosecutors never proved the e-mail was unsolicited. He also argued before the trial that the law is an unconstitutional infringement of free speech.

Jaynes can raise the free-speech issue on appeal, and Oblon said both he and Jaynes are confident the conviction will eventually be overturned. Oblon also took issue with the recommended nine-year sentence, calling it exceptionally harsh.

Zombie servers -- often innocent Internet uses whose computers become unknowing relays -- pumping out firehoses of untraceable spam? A convicted spammer claiming the right to spam as a constitutionally-guaranteed free speech right?? What a pair of sickening thoughts. Funny how nine years rotting in a jail cell doesn't sound exceptionally harsh at all for Jaynes' crime.

In a related note, across the AP wire comes a wonderful passage:

Bill Gates Gets 4 Million E-Mails a Day, Thu Nov 18, 9:02 AM ET

SINGAPORE - Bill Gates might not use AOL, but he's definitely got mail. The Microsoft Corp. chairman receives millions of Internet messages a day, said Steve Ballmer, the company's chief executive. "Bill literally receives 4 million pieces of e-mail per day, most of it spam," Ballmer said Thursday.

Spam or junk e-mails are unsolicited messages, generally advertising goods or services and usually sent to many e-mail accounts simultaneously.

Ballmer said Microsoft has special technology that just filters spam intended for Gates. In addition, several Microsoft employees are dedicated to ensuring that nothing unwanted gets into his inbox.

"Literally there's a whole department almost that takes care of it," he said.

Ballmer was in Singapore for the company's Government Leader's forum, which ends Friday.

Reminds me of Allan Schiffman quoting Ed Felton blogging at the Meltdown Conference:

The security session descended into a series of rants about the evil of spam. Lately this seems to happen often in conference panels about security. This strikes me as odd, since spam is far from the worst security problem we face online. Don’t get me wrong; spam annoys me, just like everybody else. But I don’t think we’ll make much progress on the spam problem until we get a handle on more fundamental problems, such as how to protect ordinary machines from hijacking, and how to produce higher-quality commercial software.

Says Allan, "Tell it, brother."

Email Blows

Time for another email rant. This morning while playing #1 videogame in my life -- that of zapping emails -- a quote from Bart Simpson in Screaming Yellow Honkers came to mind,

I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.

I've said before that email sucks. It's not a huge leap to declare that email blows as well.

Despite decentralized filesharing leading to global Internet traffic analysis in June 2004 revealing that in the United States peer-to-peer represents roughly two-thirds of traffic volumes, and in Asia peer-to-peer represents more than four-fifths of traffic volumes, I believe that the wasted time and resources due to the flaws in email's basic protocol (SMTP) in 2004 cannot be denied.

I've ranted before that email must evolve. For this post, let's ignore that even if email were spam-free and virus-free, that I cannot keep up with email -- my coworkers have noted that a good portion of my day is spent replying to, forwarding, archiving, and deleting email. (This is what it means to be a knowledge worker in 2004??)

Instead, let's do a reality check by reminding ourselves how bad spam and viruses really are at this moment in time. Postini's stats page, which I believe represents a good population sample, has some gems:

• 72.5% of email is spam
  
• 1 in 30 emails is virus-infected
  
• 1 in 2 SMTP connections is wasted
  
• An average of 30% of an email server's capacity is hijacked by spammers trying to steal proprietary email addresses and other information stored in the corporate directory

MXLogic's Industry Stats (pdf) also has several gems:

• Employee activities surrounding spam management (such as deleting spam, reviewing quarantine areas and asking administrators for filter preferences) takes 80 minutes per 1,000 emails with spam blocking technology; without spam blocking technology, these activities take 200 minutes per 1,000 emails (Osterman Research, 2003)
  
• Organizations with 5,000 e-mail users waste 10 minutes per end user per day on spam, and 43 minutes per day per IT staff member; the ensuing drain claims nearly $4.2 million in lost productivity per year (IDC Research, 4/04)
  
• Out of the 31 billion emails sent per day, 2.5 billion are pornographic (totaling four pornographic emails per day, per user) (Spam Filter Review, Q1, 2003)
  
• As of July 2004, 3% of Internet email complied with the federal CAN-SPAM Law (MX Logic
  Research, 07/04)
  
• More than 30 percent of spam is sent from computers that have been infected with a worm or Trojan horse and so are used as proxies for sending spam, completely unbeknownst to their owners
  (Osterman Research, 2004)
  
• Over 95 percent of viruses are spread via "junk" email. (The Gartner Group, 6/04)

Viruses and email feed off each other; email provides a conduit for viruses to spread, and many viruses as part of their actions do something to their victims' email (usually spamming and/or using it to spread the virus). Fred Vogelstein's article "Why Hackers Are A Giant Threat To Microsoft's Future" (Fortune, Oct 18 2004, pp 263-272) cites reasons why viruses like Microsoft (sources: IDC, Microsoft, Symantec):

• There are an estimated 676 million PCs in the world
  
• 84% of those PCs are online (over half have a broadband connection)
  
• 90% of those PCs run Microsoft Windows (Mac and Linux each have 3% market share)
  
• Only 120 million PCs (less than 20%) have Symantec antivirus software, which accounts for 60% of the antivirus market

I believe that part of the challenge is the social problem of teaching users to take responsibility for their machines -- that you cannot blindly trust things that come from elsewhere, and that if even one person in 6 billion responds to just one piece of spam, there will be incentives for spammers to up the ante. But there is also a technical problem: part of the challenge is the protocols need to support users by not blindly trusting things that come from elsewhere. This is a key challenge in decentralization software research today --

How can decentralized software systems be built in which the interacting parts owned by different people do not blindly trust each other?

-- and breakthroughs in this area will inform better protocols in the future. Only then will we come closer to the dream vision that

Software should work on behalf of its owner

rather than on behalf of the software writer, the software seller, or other people who can hijack the software for their own purposes.

Gmail Quota Fears -- With Good Reason

I have about 3% of my email now going to my Gmail account, and in four months of use I have filled about one-sixth of my Gmail quota (and that's with my actively deleting things). At this rate I will have filled my Gmail box in 20 months. That's not confidence-inspiring. There's no way I can open the floodgates for the other 97% of my email to flow into my Gmailbox, or I would overflow it before the end of 2004.

What's sad is that Gmail help tells me "one gigabyte -- while it's not quite a googol, it's probably more storage than you'll ever need. With so much space, you can keep all your messages..." No, actually. I can't. Let me repeat that:

Gmail actually offers much less email storage than I'll ever need.

So while I might want to consider Gmail as a net hard drive, I'm feeling increasingly less comfortable considering Gmail as a long-term email solution.

I didn't always feel this way. Once upon a time (four months ago), The Tao Of Mac assuaged my fear of Gmail's quota, with the economics of webmail storage:

Someone who receives an average of 10 messages a day at 32KB/message will take nine years to fill their Gmailbox.

I wonder if I'm eventually going to have to abandon my Gmail account because there's no more space.

The Gmail FAQ indicates that Google employees each get a terabyte of gmail, so maybe there will be a way to get more space. I would probably have to pay, since according to the secret source of Google's power, "the yearly monetized value of a webmail [is] in the $1-10 range."

So I sent a question to Gmail help to ask them what happens when I hit my Gmail limit, and if I can buy more space. The answer will affect how I use the Google Operating System going forward.

Update, August 30, 2004. I just got an update from the Gmail team, and it does not look good...

Hello Adam,

Thank you for your message.

Gmail provides you with 1,000 megabytes of storage space. When you come
close to reaching your storage limit, the quota displayed along the bottom
of your account changes from green to red to let you know that your
account is near capacity.

Should you go over your storage limit, your account will not receive
incoming mail.

We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

Oh well. My enthusiasm for Gmail just went down a bunch. Here's my plea to Google:

Please let me buy more Gmail capacity if I need it, rather than bouncing any future emails I might get...

They're probably being stingy with additional storage because they're anticipating needing that storage in beating eBay and Amazon to the Semantic Web.

What's next for Google? ISP, Browser, Desktop Search, Messenger?

A Million Mails Away

I'm way, way, way, way behind on email again. I get hundreds of emails personally addressed to me each day to about a dozen accounts, plus hundreds of Web alerts and mailing list traffic. It's impossible to keep up. As a result, I've dropped many important conversations and probably missed many important and interesting bits of information that came to me through email. (In addition, since I no longer have time to check the spam filters, I'm convinced that with increasing regularly many normal emails from friends addressed to me are getting dropped before I even have the chance not to see them.)

I wonder if my problem -- being overwhelmmed by email -- will one day be everyone's problem, of if this problem will forever be the lament of people who know lots of people. I already know several people who have a robot that replies to every email they get,

I'm busy, so if you send me email, please don't expect a reply.

I know I've already had to shut off my Instant Messengers, but email is too critical for some things to shut off. And as long as the tap is open, the firehose runneth over...

Update, October 27, 2004. I'm not the only one who complains about too much email. Example: John Battelle is starting to find his rule of ten increasingly difficult to follow...

Confessions Of A Spammer

NYT: "The tipping point for spam will always be just around the corner because spammers are so good at figuring out the potential use (or abuse) of each new technological innovation."

Most of the antispammers prefer a solution known as ''private right of action,'' which would permit consumers to hunt down spammers and sue them for small damages, say $500, in a state district court -- just enough, goes the theory, to ruin the slim profit margin on spamming. Also known as distributive justice, it's the same idea that worked to stop junk faxes a decade ago: ''death by a thousand paper cuts,'' as Ted Gavin, treasurer of SpamCon, an antispam group, likes to call it.

''A little known secret about antispammers is that many of them are fairly renowned hackers,'' Colbert says. ''They track spammers in ways that the F.T.C. can't.''

Viruses Killed The Emailing Star

Rohit Khare in an instant message to me: "XeNT FoRK mailing list crisis -- spam disabling dozens of members. I put JM@jmason on moderation; manually reactivated about a dozen. Sigh. what fix for sobig???"

Email must evolve.

Email Must Evolve

Mod-Pubsub: "Email has worn out its utility as a medium. Just as HTTP subsumed FTP (and Gopher!) by becoming wildly popular on the client side by adding some features users wanted, I'm convinced some new protocol will subsume SMTP by becoming wildly popular on the client side by adding some features users want need. Automatic whitelists and blacklists and the ability to share who's considered a spammer with other clients seem to be bare-minimum requirements; auto-classification (and sorting) like POPFile does seems important too. Also useful: a protocol that supports client policy and is easily configurable; auto-extraction of bits like dates and phone numbers and addresses; auto-backups client-side or server-side if desired (better than the lame offline sync mode!); the ability to see a unified view wherever you're checking your mail from; something like Google search for past mails; and a linking model between from/to's, subjects, keywords, and dates that makes mail more weblike."

Imagine An Email Client Without Spam And Viruses

Cameron Barrett: "Dear Microsoft....

Please fix your fucking mail software. That is all.

Sincerely yours,
The World

P.S. Entourage for Mac OS X is a great mail client."

Earlier, Cam wrote: "The statistics above show that since the middle of March I've received over 43,000 pieces of email that SpamAssassin has marked as spam. The number of spam received has risen from about 200 per day to about 500 per day in just four months."