Published in AustralianIT, August 26 2003

INDIVIDUALS hate spam because it clutters their inbox, consumes their download caps and forces them and their offspring to encounter sexually explicit material on a daily basis.

Businesses hate it for all those reasons as well, but the biggest problem with unsolicited email from an enterprise perspective is the direct financial cost it imposes.

"It's a nuisance because of its volume and its unpredictability," says Dennis Muscat, managing director of Pacific Internet Australia, one of the few ISPs offering a spam filtering service.

"It seems to be doubling every four months. While anti-spam technologies go a long way to helping with this issue, they can't always determine accurately and quarantine emails they aren't able to decide on," senior security consultant for Computer Associates Daniel Zatz says.

"This puts an extra load on the mail administrators to check the quarantine area regularly to clear it out.

"Considering most IT budgets are remaining stagnant, that's an extra task for an already over-burdened administrator."

As well as wasting staff time, spam also increases other costs. "Spam can easily fill gigabytes of space on corporate email servers," regional manager for Websense Graham Pearson says. "The tricky thing about spam is that unlike other forms of direct marketing, the cost is borne by the user," CEO of Ninemsn Martin Hoffman says.

Hoffman says Ninemsn's Hotmail service blocks 2.4 billion spam messages a day.

Then there's the threat of legal action.

"The potential cost of just one pornographic spam email finding its way to a sensitive employee or being forwarded from within an organisation to a customer or partner can be staggering," managing director of Clearswift Asia-Pacific Chy Chuawiwat says. "Litigation cases involving sexual harassment charges can reach six or seven figure sums."

Despite those concerns, the legal consequences of spam are not entirely clear locally.

Legal action pursued against spammers by Microsoft in the US would not be possible in Australia, although it might be possible to invoke the Trade Practices Act, which includes fraudulent header information, Microsoft's public affairs manager Julie Inman says.

While the Federal Government has outlined plans to make spamming illegal in Australia (a move welcomed across the industry) the impact is likely to be minimal.

"Only about 0.5 per cent of global spam comes from Australia," product marketing manager for Trend Micro Joel Montgomery says.

Difficulties in legislation don't mean that ignoring the problem is a feasible solution.

Just as companies have deployed imperfect net filtering software to avoid the possibility of being sued for creating a sexually threatening workplace, it seems likely that they'll put in place anti-spamming technology to avoid being accused of creating a spam-friendly environment.