ISP Chief: Spam Is 'A Thousand Times More Horrible Than You Can Imagine'

By Mitch Wagner

Go on. Ask Barry Shein about spam. But be prepared for an earful.

Shein is president of The World, a small, 10,000-user Internet service provider in Boston. Founded in 1989, The World was a pioneering commercial Internet service. It has survived competition from the telecoms and weathered the dot-com meltdown, but Shein is worried that it won't survive spam.

"Spam is a thousand times more horrible than you can ever imagine," Shein said. "The entire Internet mail system is under a denial-of-service attack."

The World is my personal ISP; I contacted Shein recently about recent problems I've been having with people's e-mails bouncing when they tried to send to me. I surmised, correctly, that the e-mails were bouncing because of the spam blacklists that The World has in place. I called The World's tech support and the guy at the help desk couldn't do anything for me. So I decided to call Shein directly. He's a friend of mine, I've quoted him many times over the years and we've had dinner a few times.

One of the reasons I use The World as an ISP is for its great tech support. (Also, Barry doesn't charge me for the account. But actually that doesn't weigh into my choice of ISP - if the service was bad, I wouldn't use an ISP even if they paid me.) So I was surprised by Shein's attitude toward my problem. He just didn't care.

"We're completely under attack! There are bullets flying past our ears, and you're complaining to me about a hangnail!" Shein said.

I tried to get in a question, but Shein was angry and on a roll.

"They're taking down the entire Internet. This can't go on. People are in deep denial, but it's completely collapsing before your very eyes," Shein said.

While some disagree with Shein's dire predictions, saying the problem will eventually be solved, e-mail watchers are in agreement that spam is a crisis.

Matt Cain, an analyst with the Meta Group, said technology will likely solve the spam problem before it takes down Internet e-mail. But, for now, the crisis is on; 40 percent of e-mail that comes in to enterprises from the Internet is spam, Cain said.

"There's widespread panic out there," Cain said. "There is no question in my mind that the number-one issue for e-mail managers today is blocking spam."

Enterprises spend about $20 per user per year fighting spam; that's about 10 percent of the overall e-mail budget for running Microsoft Exchange, Cain said.

Bruce Schneier, founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, agreed with Shein's dire prediction for the future. He said Internet e-mail won't go away, but the current economic model -- where we pay a relatively small charge for an Internet connection, which includes, at no extra charge, all the e-mail we can send and receive -- will be replaced by e-mail tariffs.

"The incremental cost of sending one more piece of e-mail is free," Schneier said. "Because the cost of sending a million pieces of e-mail is essentially the same as sending a dozen, spammers can make money." End users frequently belittle the spam problem, saying it's just a nuisance.

One reader responding to our spam poll said, "Has junk mail made the U.S. Postal service obsolete? Has your ATM card really made your checkbook obsolete? Nah! Get off your duff and implement one of the many vendors' anti-spam solutions, and/or program your e-mail reader with some rules-based filtering, and get back to work! There's more important things in life to worry about. Sheesh!"

Said another: "Sure, spam is annoying. But a bit of perspective here -- so are telephone solicitors. And junk surface mail. And continuous commercials. And marketing in our schools. We learn to live with it and deal. We will do the same with spam ... unless society makes the decision that we will not permit advertising to pervade every corner of our lives, that our free time is not to be auctioned to the highest bidder, and that we are willing to pay the real costs of our technologies and media, not hiding those costs in advertising, we will continue to be inundated with spam in all its various forms."

But Shein said the belittlers who compare spam to obnoxious television commercials are missing the point. TV commercials and other conventional advertisers pay for the programming that carries their ads. Even surface junkmail is paid for by the sender -- indeed, surface junkmail subsidizes some of the cost of sending a First Class letter. But ISPs and enterprises aren't paid for carrying spam, indeed, the spammers steal resources from ISPs and enterprises to send their messages. The real cost of spam is not borne by the end-user, who utters a choice curse word, hits the delete key, and moves on. The real cost is borne by enterprises and Internet service providers, like his company, that need to pay for increased bandwidth, server capacity, and -- especially -- staff to block spam and field help-desk complaints from users who don't understand that the spam isn't coming from Shein, and there's very little he can do about it.Shein estimates that about 30 percent of staff expenses at his 20-person company is now spent either putting in spam filters, or talking to customers on the phone about spam, or about false positives -- legitimate e-mail that gets erroneously tagged as spam and blocked.

He said he is frequently up until 3 a.m. himself putting in spam blocks and spends about four hours every day on spam issues.

As for my problem with missing e-mail? "The one thing I won't do is spend a remaining minute of our time talking about false positives. If we all go down in blazes, I don't care any more," Shein said.

He said the big multinational Internet service providers and telecoms are experiencing the same problems as his company, but won't discuss them because it would be bad for public relations.

"E-mail is the Waterloo of the Internet, it is a failure, and it is a total tragedy of the commons. It is on the verge of total collapse. Not until people get their heads out of the sand and start admitting to the problem will anything get done," he said.

Shein said he believes much of what's labeled as spam is, in fact, a denial-of-service attack. He even speculates that the motive behind spam isn't advertising and profit -- it's cyberterrorism. "It seems like an organized, vicious, sociopathic thing, done by someone who just hates this society," he said.

Do you expect spam to destroy the usefulness of e-mail? Take our poll and give us your opinion.

At one point, The World was under attack by 200 servers simultaneously "spewing the same spam at us," Shein said. "Little guys with scripts don't break into 200-plus servers and use them to spew at you. It seems like it's beyond what spammers are likely to be making on this stuff." Sophisticated stealth techniques and coordinating multiple servers seem to Shein to be beyond the resources of small spam businesses.

"But fortunately we're big enough and have enough horsepower to get through," he said. "The thing that's threatening to shut us down is the horrifying expenditure of human resources.

"We're victims of crime, and nobody gives a damn. That's a nice feeling -- your business is being pounded into dust by criminals, and people say, `Live with it,'" Shein said. "The spammers are calling the shots, the spammers are in charge of my time, and they are in charge of the Internet."