Netizens whose computers have been pouring millions of spam messages unwittingly should pull the plug until their machines are cleaned up, said Yahoo, EarthLink, Microsoft, and America Online.
The “cleaning” they recommend includes the creation and implemention of security patches, new standards to prevent forged e-mail, and isolation of computers that are overtaken by spammers.
"It's really our hope that these best practices are going to catalyze a lot of the other providers out there," said Yahoo senior mail platform director Ken Hickman, whose company and the other three made their call as the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance, a union they formed last year to fight spam.
Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink, and AOL have been disseminating guidelines for consumers, legitimate bulk mailers, and other Internet service providers, but several reports published late June 22 have suggested this is the first time anyone has suggested en masse that consumers' computers infected with spammers' Trojan horses and other intrusive softwares that turn their machines into spam zombies should just pull the plug until the mess gets cleaned up.
The ASTA stressed, however, that legitimate bulk mailers are not part of the problem. "Bulk e-mailers who are sending mail our members want are a big part of the e-mail community," said EarthLink product management director Stephen Currie. "A big part of our discussion was how to satisfy that group."
The four e-mail giants made their announcements during a conference call, almost a week after the Federal Trade Commission issued a call for stronger authentication practices when it comes to mass e-mailing. Spam is now said to account for up to 83 percent of all international e-mail traffic and to cost Internet providers an estimated $500 million every year in wasted bandwidth.
A rash of viruses and worms in the past year and possibly earlier is believed to have turned millions of personal computers into spam zombies. AOL believes up to 89 percent of the spam they catch might be coming through such zombie machines.
John Levine of the Internet Research Task Force praised the ASTA effort, saying their recommendations would be worth it if "the small population of organizations with sloppy mailing practices" exploitable by spammers is reformed. "It's too bad that the first thing you have to do is tell people not to do something stupid," he told Infoworld.com, "but there are still a lot of small companies with mailing lists and loosely administered mail servers."
He also said he was glad the ASTA did not cross the line into novelty. "There was always some concern that [ASTA] was going to come up with something weird," he continued. "The fact that you can look at this and say 'Yeah. Sure,' is good because it means that they're not going off on some tangent."
