When Washington State Attorney General Christine Gregoire speaks about the scourge of Spam, she knows from where she speaks. Spam complaints now represent the majority of inquiries into her state agency and Washington was the first state in the nation to enact anti-Spam legislation. The first lawsuits against spammers were also initiated here, as has a recent salvo of legal actions by Microsoft against some of the worst Spam offenders.
Brian Cartmell, the founder of Seattle’s Spam Arrest, shares this deep concern. But he also knows that legislation alone will not solve the problem, be it at a state or federal level. Stop Spam from originating in the U.S. and it will simply start trafficking through Hong Kong, Singapore or somewhere else in the world. The problem requires a global solution. Spam Arrest believes that it offers what is, practically speaking, the only fail-safe answer to ending Spam permanently.
The Spam Arrest innovation is based on the concept of Challenge-Response. The method is straightforward. It simply requires every person or business who sends you email to authorize themselves the very first time they contact you. It works like this: When someone sends you email for the first time after you’ve subscribed to Spam Arrest, the email is instantly sent back asking them to click on a link within the email and type in a word that they see. (The word is inside of a picture that cannot be read by machine but is easy for a real person.) Human interpretation is required. Once they’ve responded by typing in the word they see, they get a confirming message back saying their message has been delivered, and all future emails will be delivered instantaneously. Spam Arrest subscribers can also pre-authorize all of those in their address book. And that’s it. The second after you sign up and submit your POP (Post Office Protocol) information to Spam Arrest, your Spam ends! Period!!
Spam Arrest recently locked legal horns with Mailblocks, Inc. (a Bay-area company started by WebTV co-founder Phil Goldman). Citing patent infringement, MailBlocks tried to have an injunction issued against Spam Arrest and shut the company down, laying claim to owning valid patents for the Challenge-Response method as it applies to Spam. A Seattle U.S. District Court judge disagreed, stating Mailblocks had failed to prove outright that the patents applied to Spam, and refused to grant the injunction requested by Mailblocks. A similar Challenge-Response method introduced by EarthLink is also being challenged by MailBlocks and Yahoo! has announced yet another C-R initiative.
For Cartmell, Spam Arrest is one more success story he has authored by staying a step ahead of the Internet’s evolutionary trend line. In 1997, he founded eNIC, the Electronic Network Information Center, and officially became the domain name registry for the domain name country codes .cc (for the Cocos Keeling islands) and .tv (for the island of Tuvulu). Of course, both domains have special alternate meaning to those who have used the TLD (Top Level Domain) suffixes for their home address. Cartmel sold eNIC to VeriSign in August of 2001 for a substantial, albeit undisclosed sum.
We caught up with this master of Internet innovation to see whether he may have, indeed, created the Spam-killer’s killer app.
Seatttle24x7: Brian, before launching Spam Arrest you ran eNIC, which was the domain name registry for .CC. How did you officially become the registry for those domains?
Cartmell: We had expressed an interest in handling those domain names. In 2000, we heard back from John Postel of USC, who was essentially the central coordinator of the domain name system at that time. He basically emailed us and said, ok, you are now the registry for those country domains.
Seattle24x7: Have you ever met anybody from the Cocos Keeling islands?
Cartmell: As a matter of fact, we brought people from the island up here to Seattle and took them to a couple of the trade industry shows, one in Los Angeles and one in Yokohama, Japan. The population of Cocos Keeling is very small, about 650 people. Tuvulu (.TV) has a much larger population, many thousands.
Seattle24x7: How many of these country codes are now in existence?
Cartmell: There are 240 of them, some are being utilized and some are still not utilized. The country codes were effectively the first wave of the alternative domain names.
Seattle24x7: eNIC was then sold to VeriSign. I imagine you suddenly found yourself in a much higher tax bracket?
Cartmell: Well, (laughing) eNIC was a profitable company from day one. It was completely internally funded, no venture money was used. We sold the company to VeriSign on August 31st, 2001, just 11 days before the world changed.
Seattle24x7: As an Internet entrepreneur and a former domain name mogul, why would you want to take on a monster issue like Spam?
Cartmell: I knew that I was selling eNIC and looking for my next company. And I knew that the type of person I am, I get bored quite quickly. If I don’t have my hands in a lot of different things, I tend to go crazy. If I go on vacation for five days or something, I’ll still be working on something every day of my vacation.
Seattle24x7: I think they call it a “Type A” personality!
Cartmell: What really got us started on Spam Arrest was the fact that my partner and I were both getting around 5-600 Spam messages a day. We had been tweaking our filters on a weekly basis, and the spammers were finding ways around the filters. We both realized this simply isn’t working. We put our heads together and came up with the idea of using a Challenge-Response system with a “captcha” image. Captcha is short for “Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” We thought this had to be the inevitable place where combating Spam was going to have to go. Even if filtering was 98% effective, if there are 5 billion spam messages going out every day, you’re stilling getting 2% of that which is a lot of Spam. We reached the conclusion that the only way to do this was to go right to where we see the end game in this war which is Challenge-Response.
Seattle24x7: Challenge-Response seems so supremely logical, one has to wonder are there other companies joining you in this crusade?
Cartmell: It’s been quite an educational process for the end-user. It’s not necessarily for everybody. I think it’s for people once they’ve reached their complete frustration level where they say, “Well, it’s clear that filtering is just not going to work.” I think that’s where everyone’s headed because the spam problem keeps increasing.
Seattle24x7: You call it the SFQ?
Cartmell: Exactly, the Spam Frustration Quota. When you reach that point you say to yourself: I don’t want to talk to anybody unless they’re willing to go through this process! If they can’t verify themselves, then, y’know I’m not sure I want to talk to them. What it comes down to is deciding whose time is more valuable. I think Spam Arrest users view their time as valuable. If someone wants to reach them they know what they have to do and essentially it’s a one-time process per person.
Seattle24x7: Spam Arrest was challenged in court by MailBlocks laying claim to the Challenge-Response system. Their efforts failed because the judge agreed with your position that the concept long pre-dated any patent or any ownership of theirs. Is that correct?
Cartmell: To be more precise, the judge found that there are “substantial questions” as to whether Mailblocks has valid patents on the Challenge-Response spam blocking system that we use. He said his findings “make questionable Mailblocks’ chance of success on the merits.” We’re saying there is “prior art” that described the technology some years ago. The overall question may get resolved in another Federal court. We were basically blindsided by MailBlocks. At first, they sent us their patents in the mail. The package came without a letter or anything. Just a copy of their patents. We weren’t sure why we were supposed to be looking at their patents. Then we were contacted about licensing their product. We were willing to look into it. Then they told us: We want you out of the end-user market. We’ll license our product to you so that you can only deal with enterprises. At that point, we felt, well, now we’ve really got to look into their patents. When I looked into the business and into their patents, I determined there was plenty of prior art to their patents and didn’t feel their patents were valid. We shot off an email to that effect, and they filed suit.
Since then, EarthLink announced that they are getting into Challenge-Response and MailBlocks filed suit against them, too. Now Yahoo! has stated they’re getting into Challenge-Response as well. I haven’t heard about MailBlocks filing suit against them.
Seattle24x7: What is the status of the court case?
Cartmell: Right now, the case is stayed pending a decision by the multi-jurisdictional panel in San Francisco. There were four court cases when we asked the court to consolidate the cases. MailBlocks dropped two of the lawsuits so at the moment there are two potential cases to consolidate instead of four.
Seattle24x7: There are many initiatives to try and put an end to Spam or at least drastically diminish the volume of unsolicited commercial email. You do not believe that federal legislation can solve the problem?
Cartmell: Legislation is really a tricky situation. Right now we have every state in the nation developing its own anti-Spam laws, which I’m totally against. I think if there is going to be single standard it should be on the federal level so there is some sort of consistency, but the laws now being considered by Congress will be a nightmare for everybody. For example, it is impossibly complex for merchants who send out announcements to their customers or even potential customers to know which state they reside in. Unlike a geographic postal address, just by the very nature of having an email address, the marketer doesn’t know you’re in a particular state. It’s also very complex to try and backtrack and determine did this person really go to the Website and enter their email address or not?
The FTC has asked for expanded powers, but those are only going to work with U.S.-based senders anyway. Half your Spam could be coming from Hong Kong, if its not illegal to send Spam in Hong Kong. One of the federal initiatives is a “Do Not Email” List, but if the spammer sends out the email from Singapore what does he care? Another problem with legislation is that there may only be a few companies left that are willing or able to proceed into a small market space, or a perceived small market space. Since exploring these niches can only be done efficiently using email, the shackles being considered by the FTC could be devastating for small business.
Seattle: What about receipts and e-commerce transactions? How are they handled by your system?
Cartmell: I buy stuff from providers all the time that aren’t in my list. When their invoice goes out and they get a challenge message saying “authorize,” they authorize. Many companies on the Internet that are conducting e-commerce have efficient customer service departments to handle this kind of issue.
Seattle24x7: Are there any threats to the Challenge-Response system?
Cartmell: At the Post Office, they have a system that scans the envelopes and it uses OCR. In some cases, the computer can’t read the envelope, so the system takes a picture of the envelope and sends that picture over a computer network to a person who looks at it and types in what they see. That’s somewhat similar to how our system works. Here’s a picture, type in the words that you see. A potential threat might be that someone sets up a shop overseas where real people look at these pictures and type in what they see.
But I can’t envision how this could be economically feasible. Are spammers going to be willing to pay even 2¢ per message to authorize themselves? It’s very unlikely. We’ve already figured out systems to combat them if that happens. And if someone does use a method like that to authorize themselves you can just simply block them.
Seattle24x7: Once you determine that mail is Spam at your end, do you do anything to confront the Spammer? Have you taken a position on that?
Cartmell: We haven’t taken a formal position on that. We’ve thought about having a setting so that the consumers on their own can do that, but we’re not sure if it’s a proper role for our company to play. In any event, we’d want to deal with groups like the IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force) to make sure we’re complying and not creating any kind of additional problems by doing that in the future
Seattle24x7: How have marketers reacted to the system?
Cartmell: We haven’t found anyone who is a legitimate marketer that has a problem with it. There have been a few people who have commented that it’s burdensome for them do it for all of their customers who happen to use the system, and we’re looking into solutions to potentially fix that problem. We don’t want to allow just anybody to become a trusted party because that’s where the potential exists to open the floodgates by taking advantage of the situation and spamming everybody.
Seattle24x7: The result from choosing your service is practically instantaneous. Overnight, by subscribing to your service if I’m getting 500 pieces of spam mail a day, the Spam will literally just disappear?
Cartmell: It will literally just disappear. We’ve had customers call us up and they’re so happy. They tell us, I couldn’t deal with my email anymore and now I’ve got my email back. It’s great for them. The one thing we’ve discovered by running the service is that overall, system-wide, 70% of the email that comes in now is Spam and that figure is growing! No wonder people have reached their Spam Frustration Quota!
Reach Spam Arrest at http://www.spamarrest.com [24×7]
Larry Sivitz is the Managing Editor of Seattle24x7.
