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E-mail overload Companies risk getting crushed by all those messages if they don't devise strategies for handling the burden.
By Kimberly Patch and Eric Smalley Does it take you at least a day to slog through your e-mail in-box when you return from vacation? You can expect the onerous chore to get even worse. E-mail usage has skyrocketed, with message volumes doubling in each of the past several years at many organizations. There's no end in sight as more people use e-mail for business-to-business, business-to-customer and personal communi-cations. Even the size of the typical message has grown. And when the floodgates of elec-tronic commerce open wide, the deluge of e-mail will get even heavier as legitimate direct marketers elbow their way past the scam artists and pornographers who pioneered spam. So will the Internet come crashing down and collapse under the weight of e-mail's amazing success? The keepers of the Internet infrastructure are using improved protocols to handle the load. But ISPs, IS departments and e-mail users risk drowning if they don't devise strategies to cope with the torrent of messages. Adding it upGetting an overall view of the nation's e-mail load requires looking at a series of snapshots. America Online handles about 34 million messages per day for its 13 million subscribers, up from 17 million messages per day for 9.5 million subscribers a year ago. Two years ago, AOL handled about four million messages per day for about 6.5 million subscribers, according to a company spokeswoman. By comparison, the U.S. Postal Service handles about 293 million pieces of first class mail per day. One private sector example of e-mail deluge is New York financial services firm Merrill Lynch. Its network handles 400,000 messages per day, says Crystal Henner, the firm's director of enterprise service delivery management. Merrill Lynch's e-mail load roughly doubles each year. "E-mail has exploded over the past few years," says Lowell Gray, president of Eco Software, an ISP in Lynn, Mass. Some users receive several hundred e-mail messages per day, though in many cases much of that volume stems from e-mail discussion list traffic. About 500 million e-mail messages are delivered to U.S. homes every day, according to a report by Forrester Research, a market research firm in Cambridge, Mass. A full 28% of U.S. homes are online, more than triple the 8% of homes that were wired two years ago. That explosive growth makes e-mail an attractive medium for direct marketers. The number of homes online will more than double again by 2002, while the number of messages received will triple. The average office worker sends and receives 30 e-mail messages per day, according to a study on messaging commissioned by Pitney Bowes. The study also found that the average worker handles 52 telephone calls, 22 voice mail messages and 18 pieces of snail mail per day. E-mail volume is a product of message size as much as quantity. The average piece of e-mail has gotten 10% to 30% fatter in the past year, says Durwin Sharp, a senior technology architect at Exxon in Houston. "People are adding all sorts of neat formatting and cutesy stuff into the mail messages." No doubt about it, e-mail is an efficient way to communicate. The technology is cheap, easy to use and less intrusive than the telephone. It's become critical for sharing information among a workgroup, especially when members are in different locations and time zones, Sharp says.Stuffed mailboxesNot surprisingly, e-mail is weighing heavily on the network infrastructures that carry it. E-mail is accounting for increasing portions of IS budgets, which calls for changes in staffing and resource allocation. "We've spent this year at least 12 times what we used to spend on e-mail," says Merrill Lynch's Henner, though she notes that e-mail still accounts for a relatively small portion of the total IS budget. With a reasonable amount of planning, organizations can minimize the strain on their mail servers and networks. But managing e-mail on a personal level is a bit trickier: 60% of executives, managers and professionals, and 54% of all survey respondents polled in the Pitney Bowes study said it takes a lot of time to respond to the messages. "You see full mailboxes, you see people working longer, you see people taking e-mail with them on trips, you see people taking e-mail home with them, you see people taking e-mail on vacation," says Exxon's Sharp. "I go on vacation with my machine because if I don't keep up with my e-mail, I'll never dig out." E-mail overload is just one facet of a surplus of messaging in general, according to the Pitney Bowes study. Communication is becoming more important to most jobs, making employees busier and, ironically, harder to reach. Compounding the problem, people are generally dissatisfied with time-delayed communications, so they send more messages to convey information or initiate real-time communications. As a result, workers are forced to reprioritize tasks and juggle their schedules to handle the messages. In fact, the daily goal for many workers has become simply to read and respond to all of their e-mail, the study reports. "Everyone has a different way of working with e-mail, but I view my in-box as sacrosanct," says Doug Stumberger, a product manager on the Exchange server team at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. "My in-box has become my way of organizing my work life. A lot of the things I have to do are cued off messages, so I will do anything I possibly can to move messages out of my in-box."How to handle messagesTools that ease the process of sorting messages are showing up in major e-mail packages such as Microsoft's Outlook and Qualcomm's Eudora Pro. The tools include mailboxes or folders that serve as a hierarchical filing system for organizing messages, plus rules-based filtering options that let users set their e-mail programs to automatically sort, delete, reply to or forward messages based on a variety of attributes. Users can scan the first few lines of messages without opening them, or view their mailboxes in a variety of ways, such as displaying unread messages only. But however mailboxes are sorted, senders want their messages eventually to be read. "If somebody is out of the office frequently, it becomes a real problem because the person comes back with a full schedule and is faced with getting caught up with e-mail," says Joanne Moir, a compliance manager in the Boston office of Mellon Private Asset Management, the investment management services arm of Mellon Bank. Because she knows how time consuming e-mail can be, Moir uses return receipt for time-sensitive messages to determine when recipients have opened them, she says. One problem with e-mail tools such as return receipt, however, is that users rarely spend the time it takes to configure them or even learn how to use them. "How many of the features in your mail program do you actually use?" asks Eric Zines, an analyst in the Dallas office of market research firm TeleChoice. "Most people probably use about 10% of the power that's available in their applications." Handling the volume of e-mail is only one aspect of the overall problem. You don't need to be barraged with messages to feel overwhelmed - the content of the missives and the work they initiate are other important indicators of e-mail overload. "You hear somebody say, 'I get 300 messages per day.' Well, I don't get anywhere near 300 messages per day, but many of the messages I get require detailed and relatively thoughtful responses," Exxon's Sharp says. "If I got 300 mail messages that require the average kind of response that some of mine require, that would be six months' worth of work right there." The Pitney Bowes study recommends that users plan ahead to handle the deluge of e-mail, and block out time to read and respond to messages. You can also help your colleagues by being more careful about how you use e-mail. For example, minimize repeated messages and only distribute messages to recipients who truly need to see them.Return to senderAdding to the e-mail overload problem is the simple fact that such an inexpensive, useful tool is attractive to all kinds of businesses, including spammers. "People are sending spam because it costs them nothing. Even if they annoy millions of people, if only a handful of them respond it's profitable," says Eco Software's Gray. Broadly defined as unsolicited commercial e-mail, spam is already taking a toll on ISPs that spend time and money filtering out the bulk of it so their customers aren't overwhelmed. AOL's spam load ranges from 5% to 30%, according to a company spokeswoman. About 90% of the messages sent to Eco Software's servers are spam, Gray says. "Our customers would be outraged if that mail came through," he notes. Nina Burns, CEO of Creative Networks, a market research firm in Palo Alto, Calif., conservatively estimates that the volume of spam doubles every year. "It's going to get worse before it gets better," she says. Unlike ISPs, other businesses have been relatively successful in avoiding the worst of spam. Spam accounts for as little as 2% of e-mail received at several corporations. Although ISPs and corporate IS departments use much of the same firewall technology, companies have more control over their users' e-mail accounts. "I don't want to go on record saying we don't get any spam because somebody will fix that," says an IS executive at a Fortune 100 company who requested anonymity. "I think part of our spam success is low visibility." But given spam's exponential rise outside their corporate walls, IS managers are wise to fear its presence. ISPs have already seen what spam can do, and it's not pretty. At least three ISPs - AOL, Eco Software and Internet of the Sandhills - say they could lower the price of a basic Internet connection by $1 or $2 per month if they didn't have to contend with spam.The price of spamThe most obvious cost of spam is the time it wastes. In the business world, time is money. "Any time you use up end-user time, you really start racking up the dollars," Burns says. For example, if the average user wastes just one minute per day dealing with spam, a company with 5,000 employees who earn an average salary of $50,000 per year loses more than $500,000 per year in productivity (see graphic, page 45). There are also incremental IS-related costs: bandwidth, server hardware and labor. A burst of spam can disrupt or crash a mail server. Server hijacking poses one of the costliest threats to its victims. If a mail server is set to allow the open relaying function of Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), anyone can forward e-mail through it and make it look as if messages originated there. This is how spammers can send out hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of unsavory messages while hiding their tracks and avoiding angry replies. Not only will the mail server slow to a crawl during the attack, but bounce-backs from invalid addresses and irate replies from spam recipients also may keep the server and its administrator busy for days. "There are probably hundreds of thousands of SMTP servers out there. If we got 99% of them to stop relaying, that still leaves thousands of SMTP servers out there that spammers can use," says Paul Hoffman, director of the Internet Mail Consortium (IMC). "I cannot imagine a day when there won't be enough open relays for today's level of spammers to continue or generate even more."Declaring war on spamNot surprisingly, a market for server and desktop e-mail filtering software is blossoming in the fertile soil generated by spam and e-mail overload. Recent releases of mail server software such as Sendmail, a freeware implementation of SMTP, include antispam features. And end users can banish spam from their in-boxes by using one of the dozens of desktop spam filters with cutesy names such as MailJail and SpamEx. There are also more powerful server filters such as Bright Light Technologies' BrightMail and Berkeley Software Design, Inc.'s BSDI MailFilter to keep spam in check. Bright Light and BSDI keep their filters up-to-date by using spam traps, which are dummy e-mail accounts that attract spam. Filters identify traits that are common in spam delete messages or shunt them to a specific mailbox. For example, spam often uses fake return addresses, so one way to filter it is to search for invalid addresses in the return address field. Filtering is essentially the last line of defense in fighting spam, but it won't solve the problem by itself. "It's an arms race; it's guaranteed to fail in the end," says Adam Engst, publisher of "Tidbits," a newsletter in Seattle, and a spam filter developer. Filter users should recognize that some small percentage of the mail their filter catches will be legitimate e-mail. "Despite all the work I've done on filters, I really don't believe spam is a technological problem. It's essentially a social problem," Engst says.There ought to be a lawSocial problems often require legal or regulatory solutions, and there are dozens of pending state and federal bills that address spam. The bills' agendas range from legitimizing spam to banning all forms of online unsolicited advertising. Businesses are concerned that legislation could inhibit online direct marketing. "Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water," Microsoft's Stumberger says. Many people are pointing to a recently passed Washington state law prohibiting spammers from using false return addresses as a model for federal legislation. "It doesn't get into all the really tricky issues with freedom of speech because it doesn't outlaw spam; it outlaws false and misleading spam," Engst says. A California law passed last month makes it illegal for spammers to use other peoples' servers or domain names without permission, a move that introduces the risk of fines and jail time for spammers caught hijacking servers. However, others are looking to business practices to ultimately resolve the spam problem. Raising the cost of spamming is one approach. If ISPs meter outgoing mail and charge people based on volume, users would have to pay for each message they send out, Eco Software's Gray says.A new kind of junk mailAn emerging combination of technology, market forces, and federal and state legislation will likely be enough to slay the dreaded beast. And once spam is controlled and the risk of being associated with it fades, a plethora of legitimate direct marketing companies will be eager to step in. "The Direct Marketing Association wants to use direct e-mail advertising because it's spending tens of billions per year sending unsolicited postal mail," the IMC's Hoffman says. Even if ISPs create new e-mail pricing schemes, direct marketers will still save a bundle. Not only is e-mail a less expensive way to reach customers, it offers greater interactivity and better incremental response rates to follow-up mailings, says Bill Herp, president of e-dialog, an online marketer in Lexington, Mass. In the end, whatever it's called -e-mail direct marketing, junk e-mail or spam - the simple fact is that its volume will go up, not down. An evolution from pitches for get-rich-quick schemes and pornography to solicitations for mutual funds and laundry detergent may be of little comfort if the overall volume of e-mail you receive gets out of hand. |
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 Filtering Mail FAQ
Spam ban in a can
Review of BSDI MailFilter 1.0
How to keep spam off your net Directory of Spam-Fighting Information and Resources
White paper on controlling spam Allowing relaying in SMTP: A series of surveys Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email -
A day in the life of a spammer
John Marshall Law School in Chicago spam site Patch and Smalley are freelance writers in Boston. They can be reached at kpatch@ scriven.com and esmalley@ scriven.com
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