Observers are generally enthusiastic about Monday's announcement of a major new antispam service. But questions remain: Most notably, will it really work, and who should pay for it?
"The Bright Light folks have a reputation of being intelligent and knowing what they're doing," said John Mozena, who works for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE). "The more effort [made] and the more technically intelligent people doing this, the better it's going to be."
Mozena notes that there's a slew of spam-blocking software out there that isn't very useful, and the Bright Light effort shows a great deal of potential value.
Bright Light catches spam by using dummy email accounts on ISPs that do nothing but receive unsolicited mail. Once identified, the mail is blocked by a "spam wall" on ISPs and corporate mail servers.
Mozena cautions, however, that spam still represents a major cost for the Net's providers and surfers. "ISPs and their users are still being forced to pay for other people's advertising".
CAUCE will continue trying to achieve a legislative spam solution. The organization believes that technology alone can't stop spam, so the group wants to see an amendment to the federal statute outlawing junk faxes to include junk email. (Its proposal is embodied in HR 1748, the Netizens Protection Act.)
In such a world, Mozena notes, ISPs could spend the money they would use for Bright Light-like services on more positive services, such as increased bandwidth. Bright Light's offering starts at US$10,000 per year.
Still, to Andreas Glocker, president of Sirius Connections, a San Francisco-based ISP, the service looks promising. "It's worth some money. We hog up some good resources [dealing with spam]." If it can be automated, he said, the man hours Sirius spends on antispam efforts could be saved. However, Sirius will wait for testimonials from pilot ISPs before signing up.
Glocker prefers a solution where ISPs impose a surcharge on customers who send out more than 100 mail messages a day as a deterrent to spam. But the problem is getting ISPs together to agree on it.
"ISPs can't agree on anything," he said.
The US Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capability unit has tried to alert sites to computer-security incidents, such as bugs and viruses. It has recently focused its attention on spam, and the organization's Phil Cox thinks Bright Light is taking the right approach.
"I think this is a good thing to do, but like any kind of [new effort], it will be interesting to see what problems they face, and just how realistic they are in their estimates as to what they can do against spam.
"Hopefully, when they make mistakes they'll learn and correct."
