It's been almost a decade since spammers and the people who try to stop them started to change in a competitive way. As with the classic "cheetah and gazelle" model, which Darwin came up with, every time one group gets a little faster or more agile, its enemies come up with ways to trick and outrun it.
Spam not only sends people unwanted emails that waste their time, but it also uses up a lot of network bandwidth. Because of this, many organisations and individuals have taken it upon themselves to fight spam in many different ways. But because the Internet is open to everyone, there isn't much you can do to stop spam, just like you can't stop junk mail.
No one ever asks for it or wants it. No one ever eats it; it's the first thing that gets moved out of the way when the main dish is served. Some of it is useful, like the 1% of junk mail that some people find really helpful.
Jupiter Media Metrix says that the average American got 571 commercial electronic messages that they didn't ask for in 2001. Jupiter says that by 2006, that number will rise to 1,400, and more than 206 billion spam messages will be sent out. Even though these numbers are notoriously hard to figure out, every survey and ISP record shows that spam is on the rise, sometimes by as much as 300 percent from one year to the next. The size of the anti-spam effort is a good way to tell how big the problem is. During the Web bubble, the number of tools ISPs, businesses, and consumers could use to fight spam grew by a lot. At the same time, big Web marketers and interactive ad companies have been working hard to set their services apart from those of the bad guys and to fight back against the growing calls for the government to control digital marketing.
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA), through its subsidiary, the Association of Interactive Marketing (AIM), has made one of the biggest moves of this kind by putting out guidelines for online commercial solicitation. The goal is to encourage marketers to have high ethical standards. The rules say that members must tell people who get their e-mails how they can stop getting them in the future, and consumers must be able to stop their addresses from being sold or rented.
