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Spam: It's a Four-Letter Word
Internet spam is arguably the most worrisome form of junk e-mail because it has the potential to overwhelm us, unless steps are taken to deal with the situation. As spam services hijack our servers and use them as mail-forwarding agents, they are, in essence, mounting denial-of-service attacks on systems. Recently, we brought up a new mail server for testing, giving it a fairly obvious name (mail.syr.edu). It was attacked that night, used to forward 50,000 or so messages advertising the latest make-your-fortune scam. Needless to say, we won't be using that name for our production mail server.
At its root, spam needs to be dealt with as a public-policy question through legislative and judicial action at the federal level, notwithstanding objections from the libertarian left (or is it right?). There is some evidence that this has begun to happ
en, though not fast enough to stem the tide. Skeptics will argue that government involvement may make matters worse, that enforcement will be impossible, but I think tough laws and selective prosecution could be powerful deterrents.
Although an organization can take steps to limit the volume of spam entering its network, unanticipated side effects are often felt. Recently, we implemented changes to the sendmail configuration on our main mail server, establishing rules that would force DNS lookups on the host portion of incoming mail messages before we would accept the mail. It seemed like a reasonable response to spam, which often spoofs the domain name. Unfortunately, this caused some legitimate mail to be rejected from sites that don't do a very good job of maintaining their DNS entries. Eventually, software designed to protect us from spam will no doubt emerge, but I wonder whether it will be any more successful than software that restricts access to pornographic Web sites. And there's no doubt that it
will result in more work and more headaches for network and systems managers. We'll probably learn about this software from our bosses, who will forward information that was sent to their CIO mailing list--"FYI, thought you might find this message interesting."
Mailing List Mania
Internet mailing lists are another source of incredible volumes of e-mail that must be processed, even if processing simply means hitting the delete key before reading. For many years, I've managed some fairly active mailing lists, so I can appreciate their value. Once you've managed mailing lists for a while, you gain an appreciation for the norms associated with adding and deleting addresses.
It is increasingly common to have your name added to a list simply because someone thought it might be of value to you. Sometimes, it's a professional association providing a service, while other times it's a list that has been created from a sign-up sheet that you innocently filled out at a seminar or user-group meeting. For
me, as a network manager, the magnitude of the problem is reinforced when I get messages from other administrators at my site asking for help in getting their addresses removed from a list to which they never subscribed. By the time they turn to me, they've already tried to unsubscribe on their own, but these intelligent listservs aren't always so adept at dealing with mail aliases. So I get to spend my time helping others deal with this problem, usually by tracking down the list owner and sending a polite request to "Please remove so-and-so from the damned mailing list to which some idiot added him or her without his or her knowledge. Best regards."
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not challenging the value of Internet mailing lists. If they're well-managed, they can be very useful and the signal-to-noise ratio is often quite a bit higher than it is on UseNet news. But like any mail technology, the potential for abuse is tremendous.
Messaging System, At Your Service
Automated e-mail delivery is a g
rowing application of messaging technology and a potentially effective vehicle for distributing information. I have sat through far too many staff meetings whose agendas could have been reduced by 80 percent if we dispensed with the routine announcements related to system or application performance. E-mail is an ideal medium for announcements; meetings are an ideal forum for group discussion--use the best tool for the job.
Like a well-trained rat, I dutifully review automated system status report messages that arrive daily via e-mail. I have even defined rules for some of them in my e-mail client application, automatically filing low-priority messages into folders. Believe it or not, I do occasionally reference them, though it would undoubtedly be more efficient to make them available, properly indexed, via a Web-based application. I also receive, as previously noted, automated project updates via e-mail, and in the future, I will receive more automated messages generated by the workflow modules of client/
server apps. I just hope this doesn't turn into the mainframe report distribution for the '90s.
Intraspam
That leaves us with intraspam, an emerging phenomenon tightly tied to organizational culture. Under what circumstances does one have the right to redistribute e-mail to an internal mailing list? It's so easy these days to set up a private mailing list in your e-mail application, it's a wonder this isn't more of a problem. As e-mail vendors add support for HTML, the frequency of such messages will no doubt increase as people find it impossible to resist the temptation to send Web pages to their colleagues.
Fortunately--or unfortunately, depending on your perspective--many of your coworkers would never think of engaging in such activities, just as they would never think to inform you in person of some vital issue. In this sense, it's difficult to be critical of those who take the time and effort to share information with their coworkers. But the result is the same--more messages in your inbox
to process.
Despite all these problems, I'm still an e-mail advocate. Like any communication technology, it has potential for abuse. But individuals and organizations will adapt to it. Network and system managers need to play a leading role in this, both by implementing technical solutions where they exist and also by encouraging the development of appropriate policies and norms. And if you happen to be reading this column on the Web, you might think about forwarding it to your manager: "FYI, thought you might be interested in this column."
Dave Molta is director of network and system services at Syracuse University. He can be reached at dmolta@nwc.com.
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