Just when you thought it was safe to check your inbox, it turns out that e-mail, that invaluable tool for marketing meetings, corresponding with attendees, and communicating with suppliers and clients, is out of control and ready to implode. Consider this: As of May 2003, unsolicited commercial e-mail, better known as spam, comprised 51 percent of all messages received by workers, and by July, that percentage had reached 55 percent, according to Message Labs, a global leader in e-mail management. And as you read this article, the percentage of junk mail has probably climbed even higher.
And e-mail woes aren't all about spam. E-mail- borne computer viruses are drastically increasing in potency and frequency. The CERT Coordination Center, a Pittsburgh, PA-based monitor of computer viruses, reported 21,756 separate virus attacks in 2000. Two years later, that number had grown by nearly 400 percent. And 2003 should see the number of viruses double again, with 76,404 different viruses reported in the first half of the year, and even more coming in the second half.
Computer bugs are also getting smarter. This year's Sobig worm was the fastest virus ever, and it spread to millions of systems in a single day. Sobig clogged inboxes and cost users in wasted time and disk space, but the malignancy stopped there -- it didn't erase hard drives or crash infected computers, as many had feared.
Consider the story of Bob Ellis, owner of Ellis Associates in Woodbridge, CT, who says he uses "e-mail to communicate for all the internal elements of the meeting -- extensive work with speakers, exhibitors, internal planning committees, et cetera." Ellis was a secondary victim of September's Sobig virus, in that his system was not damaged, but his e-mail address was hijacked by the virus, and somewhere out in cyberspace, infected computers sent out hundreds of e-mails that identified him as the sender. "It attached to my e-mail address, and I received dozens of e-mails saying that notes I never sent were bounced back by antivirus systems."
Although the "return to sender" messages clogged Ellis' inbox, he says his business did not sustain any serious damage because of Sobig, and he remains philosophical about the experience. "You have to deal with it," he advises. "There's no use in ranting and raving."
But there's little to stop the next big worm from destroying records and leveling computer networks. That's what's keeping security experts and many meeting planners up at night, hoping that tomorrow isn't the day for a computer virus catastrophe.
Black Mail
When it comes to communication, the meetings business is a technology-intensive industry. At least three-quarters of meeting planners use e-mail to communicate with attendees, clients, or suppliers, estimates Bellingham, WA-based meetings technology expert Corbin Ball. For many planners, it's their primary marketing and communications vehicle, something that their jobs depend on. "More and more planners are using e-mail to communicate to attendees, and if they're not, they should be," says Ball. "Attendees want e-mail." Trouble is, he says, "Spam and viruses are decreasing the utility of e-mail. It's become a huge problem."
Marian Long, senior marketing manager at the Northbrook, IL-based Allstate Financial, is a typical planner when it comes to her use of e-mail. She manages between 25 and 30 corporate meetings every summer, with about 30 attendees at each meeting, and e-mail is her favorite way to communicate with attendees, suppliers, and corporate higher-ups. On a slow day she responds to 50 electronic messages; on a busy day, more than 100. "We have a lot of small meetings and we try to communicate with everybody via e-mail," she explains. "E-mail is good because they have things in writing," which makes record keeping easier, and it's often the fastest way to communicate as well. Plus, she says, "It's cheaper than the phone." However, because planners like Long use e-mail to communicate with diverse groups, including attendees, clients, supervisors, and suppliers, they are especially vulnerable to e-mail-borne viruses.
Candy Adams, a consultant with Trade Show Consulting in Carlsbad, CA, loves creative collaboration with her clients on exhibit ideas and other projects, and this process often means sharing many types of documents via e-mail -- Word and Excel files, jpeg images, even QuickTime movies. It was during such a file-swapping session that Adams got a virus. "A client and I were sending drawings back and forth, we were brainstorming, and I just saved their stuff they sent me -- links, pictures, and all kinds of stuff, and I'd open them up," she recalls. "At the end of the day I had a virus."
Adams' virus protection did not fend off the worm she was unintentionally sent by her client, and her system was shut down for two days. Eventually, it was brought back to life by a professional computer tech. It was a costly lesson that prompted Adams to invest in more antivirus software. "I don't want to spend my life chasing viruses," Adams says. "We have to open a lot of outside files in our business. It's hard to tell what might be a virus."
Collateral Damage
Even planners who personally avoid spam and viruses are troubled by the junk on the Internet. Because attendees, suppliers, and clients have stepped up their own antivirus precautions, some legitimate e-mails are blocked from their inboxes, which causes trouble for planners sending out marketing materials and other event-related correspondence.
"Some of the groups I work with are low-tech, and some of the exhibitors have two-person offices, and the first time you try to send anything as an attachment, like a show kit, it will bounce right off their firewall," Adams relates. Because viruses are usually shipped as attachments, many security systems inadvertently repel messages with legitimate attachments.
For one client, Adams and her team attempted to send the show kit to exhibitors as a 70-page PDF file. But unfortunately, most had their firewalls set on "high," so many messages never reached their destinations. "We had to break the kit down and send it in pieces. We had to ask IT departments to let our e-mails through," she remembers. "And in the end, we had to FedEx the show kit, because the e-mail was so unpredictable. One attendee, a woman from Australia, got it the day she got back from the show." In the end, Adams estimates the group of 135 incurred more than $2,700 in shipping costs because of the blocked e-mails.
There are also costs associated with investing in antivirus and anti-spam technology for event marketing. "Whether we're working with low-tech clients, or even Oracle, everyone is so concerned about security that if we're not taking proactive steps, we're not doing our job," says Michael Winner, vice president of technology for Burlingame CA-based Conference Planners, which this year became TruSecure Certified, a third-party certification that ensures that the company has taken the necessary steps to thwart security breaches.
Conference Planners spends around 15 percent of its technology budget on security, and while Winner admits it's a "huge expense," he says "there's no such thing as overkill when it comes to security."
Taming of the Spam
While virtually everyone agrees that spam and viruses are serious threats to e-mail and computing, there is no consensus on what must be done to address the threat. Some experts support the creation of a "do-not-mail" registry, much like the controversial "do-not-call" registry, that would block communications from unknown sources. Others think the future of spam control lies with a new California law that could actually have disturbing implications for meeting planners.
In late September a law went into effect that made it illegal for spam marketers and their advertisers to e-mail Californians unless the recipient specifically requested it or had a previous business relationship with the sender. More than a dozen states, including California, already have laws in place that regulate spam, but California's is the first to allow that allows recipients, the state, and Internet service providers to sue advertisers as well as the senders of spam. The law allows plaintiffs to sue spammers for up to $1,000 per unwanted message, or up to $1 million for each spam campaign.
Because roughly 20 percent of e-mail passes through systems residing in California, the law could discourage spammers who have no way of knowing if they're e-mailing Californians or not. It's a law that could be good news for people who have clogged inboxes, but it has some planners wondering about their ability to communicate with attendees and exhibitors.
Like other California planners, Jayna Blackwell, meeting and event administrator for the State Bar of California in San Francisco, is worried about how the new anti-spam legislation could affect e-mail communication with attendees. "I'm concerned about the new ruling," she relates. "E-mail is a very important marketing tool for us. It's a cost-effective way to communicate with our membership."
Blackwell usually sends out at least two blast e-mails to members before every event, and, she says, "It definitely would be difficult to scrounge up our entire membership's consent" to receive e-mail notifications "because we have 300,000 members." Switching to snail mail would increase her marketing expenses considerably, since she handles about 70 percent of communication via e-mail. It remains to be seen how the new law will affect planners like Blackwell, as it has not yet been tested in court.