As much as 51 percent of all email is spam, according to Dallas-based research group dbCanvas. In the adult industry, that might be a conservative estimate. While some adult webmasters fear being branded as “known spammers,” simple but lifestyle-changing services are on the way to prevent a user’s machine becoming a dummy spam terminal.
Earthlink has been gradually adopting a program that requires passwords for outgoing mail. After a year, company sources report that 80 percent of its users have signed on for the protocol. Some SMTP servers can be configured in programs like Microsoft Outlook or Macintosh Mail to automatically authenticate outgoing mail in the same way incoming mail is inspected, but that can also make a computer a spammer when it is infected by a virus.
Password-protecting the transmission of mail would require a change in attitude, said Earthlink communications director Stephen Currie. “Any action can be a little daunting when you're trying to migrate millions of people,” he said.
Internet service providers like Earthlink and America Online are beginning to see the need for outbound controls. Subscriptions and revenues go down when other ISPs block spam-ridden mail.
"If there's a lot of spam or abusive mail coming from a particular network, in the future you're going to see that email having low rates of deliverability," Currie said.
Inbound spam filters cannot get much more effective without blocking messages from legitimate mailers said Carl Hutzler, anti-spam coordinator for AOL. He said the focus must shift to killing spam where it starts.
