Surfing Silicon Valley: Spam scram

By San Francisco Bureau Chief Greg Lefevre

March 26, 1998
Web posted at: 11:18 AM EST (1118 GMT)

(CNN) -- One of the heroes of the coming digital generation may be Eric Allman. He dropped by the bureau this week to talk about his soon-to-be realized dream of skimming the bad spam from the good e-mail. Interviewed by Steve Young on CNNfn, he had that Cheshire grin that seems to say, "I'm really on to something."

Allman claims his software will eliminate that awful junk e-mail that clogs your inbox every morning. From his lair at www.sendmail.org, Allman has dreamed up a system for use by big companies to install on their servers. He won't say how it works.

I can't wait for a consumer version. I'd be happy with anything that kills any incoming mail where the subject or sender includes "wealth," "opportunity," "tiffany" or more than one "x." I used to look forward to hearing that voice on my America Online sign-on say, "You've got mail!" Nowadays it just means I've got junk to sort through before I get to messages from my friends.

What to do? Allman says stay off newsgroups, warning that e-mail address-building programs send out software robots to scan for e-mail addresses. Newsgroups are great pickings for spammers. They're chock full of @ and become a rich harvest for spam list creators.

Spam hazards

Junk e-mail is more than a nuisance. It can also be hazardous. Thousands of Pacific Bell subscribers learned that last week in San Francisco. The system crashed, overloaded by hundreds of thousands of junk e-mails. Pacific Bell says the load was simply too much and that it was junk e-mail that did it. For much of the day pacbell.net subscribers could not get through. For the hundreds of people whose business submissions, resumes, medical reports, marriage proposals and acceptances that did not go through, the issue of junk e-mail went beyond free speech.

Spam is costly

John Quarterman writes in Microtimes that spam costs plenty. Figure this. If a spammer sends one message to a 10 million-name list, then 10 million people have to take about 10 seconds to delete the message. Take that time and multiply it by a reasonable salary and you come up with about $70,000 in wasted time.

Apple items of the week

Will Steve or won't Steve? The company that bounced Steve Jobs then paid $450 million to woo him back is reportedly throwing money at his feet to keep him on permanently. Along with stock prices, Apple's board sees the company's fate improving and it wants Steve to take the CEO post.

Since Gil Amelio was fired last year, Jobs has been in charge, in fact, but not in name. He's been acting like the CEO and not like the acting CEO, and it's working. We've seen a bundle of new, tightly focused products. The G3 desktops are getting rave reviews and it looks like there's more cool stuff to come.

It's clear Jobs loves a quest. He's an effective leader but demanding and tough to work for at the same time. Jobs has clearly gotten through the first stage of the new Apple plan: Clean up its business act and get good products to market. Now it's time for the follow-through: To reclaim lost market share Apple needs to negotiate some major new partnerships. Without a stay-the-course leader at its helm, it cannot recruit mega-companies to make mega-partnerships.

Surf on ...

Related stories:

• Surfing south of market
• Surfing Silicon Valley: Wild rides and wilder weather

Related sites:

• Sendmail Home Page
• John Quarterman: Spam Considered Harmful
• Apple Computer Inc.

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