Spam, the virtual kind and not the canned pork-meat, invokes a multitude of adjectives - disgusting, repulsive, sickening, and horrible, to name a few (although the meaty spam too, has been known to evoke similar adjectives!) While not definitive, the origin of the word spam was probably inspired by a comedy routine on the British television series Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which the word is repeated incessantly. The American Heritage® Dictionary (4th edition) and the Oxford English Dictionary New Edition (2001) both provide identical definitions of spam: unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups.

The statistics are nauseating. A study by leading anti-spam software firm Brightmail Inc. tabulated 44% of all e-mail traffic as spam. Research firm Gartner estimates that an Internet service provider (ISP) with 1 million subscribers annually spends about $7 million fighting spam. In the past 18 months, ISP EarthLink said it has seen a 500% increase in spam e-mails. Yahoo disclosed that it receives about five times more spam than it did a year ago.

The predictions are dire. If only one percent of all US small businesses decided to send just one spam a year, then every e-mail user would receive 657 e-mail marketing messages every day, forecasts the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. "More than 50% of e-mail will be spam, by the end of this year, if not sooner," according to Brightmail's CEO Enrique Salem. Imagine the consequences if the proportion of spam, which continues to increase at alarming levels, engulfed a significant portion of all emails. In separate research, Brightmail found a 4.5% month-on-month increase in spam. This figure for April 2003 was 61% higher than April 2002. Continued Enrique, "If the proportion of spam hits 90%, it will make e-mail unusable."

It is amusing, if not downright offensive, when virtual mass marketers on occasion, claim their messages to be 'legitimate spam,' an oxymoron. From a business perspective, "Spam and security threats are two of the biggest nuisances on the net. The problem with spam is well documented, but to get close to the 50% mark is astonishing," according to the British ISP BT Openworld that commissioned the Brightmail study. The amount of spam in the networks today is about 16 times what it was two years ago. Gartner predicts that unless an enterprise takes defensive action, more than 50% of its message traffic will be spam, by 2004.

Several US legislators have introduced bills to combat spam that would require e-mail marketers to identify their messages in the subject line as advertisements, create a national list of consumers who do not want to receive spam and require marketers to provide legitimate return addresses and remove recipients from mailing lists if they request it. But there is a high probability, universally accepted, that these bills will not stop spam. According to Gartner, spammers make money by disguising spam as legitimate messages. They send spam to as many valid addresses as possible, knowing that one-quarter of one percent of recipients will make a purchase. Spammers will not do anything to jeopardize their profit margins, such as removing recipients from mailing lists merely because they asked to be removed. And, despite anti-spam laws in 29 US states and numerous countries, spammers that feel at legal risk often circumvent the law by sending their messages using offshore ISPs.

Recently, Sandeep Krishnamurthy, University of Washington marketing and e-business professor was quoted in Internet Week: "Spam has virtually killed e-mail as a legit marketing tool. Too many people receive too much junk in their e-mail, leading to the 'deletion impulse.' E-mail marketing has now been reduced to an activity focused on retention rather than acquiring customers, mainly as a result of spam."

Tushar is a marketing/business development professional and a recent graduate of the UW MBA program. He is a regular volunteer at TiE Seattle and occasionally at the Northwest MIT Forum. Tushar resides in Bellevue, WA, and may be reached at tusharjm1@yahoo.com.