An e-mail marketing coalition has further solidified its fight against a damaging archenemy.

The spread of unsolicited bulk e-mail, generally known as "spam", has plagued e-mail marketing companies for years. As part of its latest effort to distinguish legitimate e-marketers from fraudulent spammers, the Email Service Provider Coalition (ESPC), of which Ottawa-based Gotmarketing Inc. is a member, along with two partner organisations, recently released its Email Marketing Pledge, which calls on e-mail marketers to obtain informed consent from recipients before sending any electronic messages.

It's an effort to "increase industry accountability by creating a distinct line between spam and legitimate e-mail marketing", the coalition said in a joint statement with the Interactive Advertising Bureau and TRUSTe. The industry lobby groups referred to the pledge as "the clearest, most concise set of e-mail marketing guidelines to date".

Lynda Partner is a founder of Gotmarketing Inc., considered to be the largest sender of marketing e-mails in Canada. She says such coalition-building is crucial if legitimate e-marketers don't want to be lumped in with fraudulent spammers and automatically blocked from the inboxes of potential customers. Spam refers to unsolicited bulk e-mail that is sent to a web user without his or her consent. Such messages typically contain bothersome and deceptive "get rich quick" schemes or links to pornographic web sites. Some spam even contains harmful viruses.

To ensure messages from e-marketers aren't automatically blocked by anti-spam software, Partner says businesses in her industry need to work closely together. It's critical e-mail marketers agree on using a common identifier that could be embedded in every single message they send, says Partner. This way, recipients know who the sender is before they even open the message, subsequently wiping out any perception of deception.

"Spam exists for one reason and one reason alone: It's really easy to hide your identity because of a weakness in the protocol of e-mail that says, 'I can't tell who this e-mail is coming from'," says Partner. "It's impossible to tie back e-mail to the sender. So, if we fix that problem, legitimate marketers will be willing to stand up and say, 'Yes, I will register myself, I'm going to tell you who I am, I'm going to give you all my identification and a way to reach me'."

A common identifier would also make life easier for Internet service providers, all of which are constantly bombarded with messages with misleading addresses. For example, some spammers may pose as someone from eBay or Microsoft by composing a fraudulent sender address. Identifiers will make it easier for Internet service providers to differentiate between deceptive and legitimate mail, allowing servers to get rid of the spam while placing registered senders into the fast lane, says Partner.

Traditionally, "marketing people haven't done anything but tactical things to get their e-mail to its destination", Partner says.

Carolyn Gardner, president of Kanata-based e-marketing firm cardcommunications, acknowledges e-marketers have thought up all sorts of ways to get around anti-spam filters and blocks. Such strategies include permission-based messages sent to newsletter subscribers, as well as "avoiding all-caps subject lines with lots of dollar signs and exclamation marks".

Meanwhile, anti-spam software is growing more sophisticated, as illustrated by Ottawa-based Roaring Penguin Software Inc. One of the company's flagship products is CanIt-PRO, an anti-spam software that allows users to blacklist the message, accept it, put it on a preferred whitelist, reject it or put it "under quarantine".

To work around such software through "tactical strategies" is not enough, says Partner. "There is a growing consensus in the industry that there is a way to dramatically reduce or eliminate spam entirely" by going the way of a common identifier. While such a move is still at the talking stage, characterised by industry white papers, Partner is confident the industry will soon put words into action.

Partner adds that anti-spam legislation, such as the American bill recently passed by the United States Senate, can only do so much. She says it's one thing to outlaw fraudulent e-mails, but it's another to actually track down the culprits and prosecute them. It's next to impossible to physically locate spanners because they frequently change servers and computers, she adds. Accordingly, she says the federal government believes the problem should be solved by the e-marketing industry and that "legislation isn't necessarily the solution".

Scott Foster can be reached at scott.foster@transcontinental.ca