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American Morning

Is There Anything More Annoying Than Stream of Junk E-Mail You Receive Almost Daily?

Aired May 20, 2002 - 08:47   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: With apologies to Dr. Seuss, I do not like spam, not in a can, not in a scan, and definitely not flooding my inbox on my computer. Is there anything more annoying than the stream of junk e-mail you receive almost daily on your computer? The Federal Trade Commission says it now gets as many as 40,000 consumer complaints per day. We asked people how they feel about getting spammed. Check it out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When I open it up, it's usually like -- probably about 50/50, something like that, but a lot of it is junk.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's nothing you can do other than delete it and deal with it. There's no other way to -- you try to block them and they still get through.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I usually send an e-mail telling them to get me off the mailing lists, but sometimes it doesn't work or they make you go through a process to get your name removed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAFFERTY: Twenty-five percent of all e-mail received is said to be spam. That's according to a recent issue of "PC Magazine" devoted entirely to that subject.

Joining us to talk about spam and what you can do about stopping it is Lance Ulanoff, senior executive producer at pcmag.com.

Lance, good to see you.

Where'd this word come from, spam? What's that mean?

LANCE ULANOFF, SR. EXEC. PRODUCER, PCMAG.COM: Unwanted, unsolicited commercial e-mail. It's hard to say exactly where the word originated, but clearly, it's commercial e-mail that's selling you something you never asked for, don't want.

CAFFERTY: How do I become vulnerable to this? I mean, where do they get my name?

ULANOFF: There's a lot of different ways. And basically, any way they can. If you sign up for a sweepstakes, your e-mail is in the hopper. You can opt in -- if you don't pay attention, you sign up for a newsletter, and there's a little checkbox. You check that off, and suddenly your e-mail's in the list. Your e-mail can be sold to someone. Your e-mail just can be sold to some one. It can even be picked up by a worm or virus that a site will have. They'll pick up your e-mail address and put it into the hopper.

CAFFERTY: So it's like being on an Internet mailing list, right, as opposed to a conventional mailing list, where you get all that stuff in your mailbox?

ULANOFF: Right, spam mail is like all the garbage you get in your traditional mail, and it's also the same kind of stuff -- win a million dollars, come to the casino, lose a hundred pounds, I've got a great business deal for you.

And the thing is, they've gotten really, really talented to delivering to mail and making you open it, because the subject lines are, hey, about our conversation, or, hey you...

CAFFERTY: The familiarity, that sense of I must know who this is from. As if you were already engaged in it. What can I do to minimize and eliminate it -- maybe you can't eliminate it. There are things that people can do to get out from under a little bit of this.

ULANOFF: You can't eliminate it completely. You're going to run into it. But you can do things like, you know, delete it, don't open it, don't try and respond, don't try and get off the e-mail address, because 95 percent of the time, that's not going to help you.

CAFFERTY: So just hit the little "x" button and get rid of it.

ULANOFF: Delete it, right. There are also these things called DEA, which are disposable e-mail addresses. And if you have those, you can set them up with these free services, and if you visit a site and sign up for something or even if you visit a site and you don't sign up for something, these will take your e-mail and deliver it to your e-mail box, but they shield you from the spam or from the site, knowing your exact e-mail address. So if you realize they're spamming you, sending you garbage e-mail, delete that alias address and you've solved your problem. You can set up many of these, and most of the services are free.

CAFFERTY: We've gotten e-mails from viewers of AMERICAN MORNING about this very subject, because we mentioned a couple hours ago we were going to talk about this. Let me share a couple with you.

One of them fellow named Randy: "If I were to paint an add on someone else's car without their permission, I'd be thrown in jail. Spam is the same. It's using other people's computers without their permission."

There are no laws against this. Why not?

ULANOFF: No.

CAFFERTY: Why not?

ULANOFF: People don't realize oftentimes that they've signed up for these things. It's not illegal to solicit you, to send e-mail to you and try to get you to try out some great new deal. But there are levels of abuse. And if you've asked to be removed, or if you've went to a site and you didn't opt in, and you're getting e-mails that you did not expect, you can report abuse. I will say , it's not much help.

CAFFERTY: I was going to say, that probably gets you nowhere.

ULANOFF: You'll report them, and eventually, maybe the ISP can do something, the people who host the Web site that might be sending you this garbage mail, but it's going to be kind of a losing battle. The best way you can protect yourself is set up filters, to have junk mail go into a special folder that you can decide then whether or not then it's actually junk mail.

CAFFERTY: OK, you can actually run this stuff off into a corner of the room and look at it by itself later on. Let me do these other two real quickly.

Brandi wrote to us, "I've tried every trick in the book to block spam. Each time you figure out a way to block it, they think up another way to get around it." Now here's good advice. "I will never buy from someone who sends an unsolicited advertisement."

I guess if everybody did that, that would probably have some cumulative effect.

ULANOFF: If they get a 10 percent, an 8 percent return on response and they send millions of them out, there's successful, and that's what they're getting, so this is big business, and they won't stop.

CAFFERTY: The last e-mail's from Justin. It says a law needs to be passed, particularly unsolicited spam from like pornographers and adult Web sites. Why isn't somebody doing something about that, particularly -- I mean, people have kids and stuff. They don't want their children to see this garbage.

ULANOFF: It's truly insidious, and it's really unfortunate. There have been calls to put all of those Web sites under a specific domain because that's one of the ways you can stumble on them, because that's one of the ways that you can end up with that garbage e-mail. If you type in whitehouse.com, that's a pornography site; that's not the government's site, and then they can use a worm to pick up your e- mail address, and the next thing you know, you're on that list. So absolutely, if they kind of cordon off some of that stuff, it might help.

CAFFERTY: We're going to have to end our discussion there. Can they get more at pcmag.com on the Net?

ULANOFF: Absolutely, pcmag.com/spam.

CAFFERTY: All right, Lance Ulanoff, thank you for your help this morning.

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