ISPs: Coping With Email Abuse While Meeting Customer Expectations
By Daniel P. Dern
Charles Stiles, co-vice-chair of MAAWG and postmaster for America Online (AOL)
Eighty percent or more of email today consists of spam, viruses, phishing, messages with spoofed addresses, bounce responses from undeliverable messages, and other e-trash according to John Ore, director of product marketing for Sendmail, Inc. "We have ISP and enterprise level customers doing 100-500K messages an hour, needing to get rid of that much of it."
"Most of this bad email is spam," agrees Email Security Practice Lead Analyst Richi Jennings with Ferris Research, a San Franciscobased research institute focused on messaging and collaborative technologies. "If you examine all the undesirable email, about 80 percent is spam, 10 percent is phishing and 10 percent is viruses."
When filtering and blocking is applied, most spam never gets to users' inboxes. "The state-ofthe- art of spam filtering is something like 95 percent of all spam is filtered out, and a small amount of false positives happen," says Jennings. (See: What Email Users Don't See on page 15)
The Cost
But blocking and filtering these messages, which the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) refers to collectively as, "abusive email that seeks to exploit the end-user" isn't cheap. The cost of filtering spam, according to a recent Ferris Group study (just for businesses), is about US$50 billion a year worldwide, of which about US$17 billion is in the United States. Those numbers only reflect the cost to run or outsource antispam services, and the time wasted by end-users going through quarantines for false positives. They do not reflect losses due to phishing or other threats.
ISPs and network carriers are all working on the problem. This includes working groups like MAAWG, whose sponsor and full members (listed at: maawg. org/about/roster/) include major ISPs and vendors like AOL, Cisco, Cloudmark, Cingular Wireless, Comcast, Cox, EarthLink, Microsoft, Sun, Symantec and Yahoo!. "The biggest thing MAAWG does is bring the industry together, to talk openly and freely about what they're doing on the message abuse level and the pros and cons of those solutions," says Charles Stiles, co-vice-chair of MAAWG and postmaster for America Online (AOL).