“I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren’t so irritating.”
— Bill Gates (Why I Hate Spam, Microsoft PressPass, 2003)
“Spam will be a thing of the past in two years’ time”
— Bill Gates (BBC News (January 24 2004)
In my Logical Tips ezine, I can never use the word “spam” because then no one would ever get the email I send out. Thanks to content filters, my feelings on the matter have to be curtailed. So in addition to being expensive and annoying, spam also curtails our basic right to free speech.
Fortunately, here in my letter to the editor, on a Web page, I can speak the word freely. (SPAM – there I’ve done it again!)
Like Bill and pretty much everyone else, I hate spam. I hate how it is basically destroying the Internet like a continually growing cancer that seems to have no cure. This idea is not new news. But here’s what I don’t get. Lately, spam doesn’t even make sense.
Realistically, when spam began hitting our in boxes, it had an obvious purpose. Spam emails contained a sales message designed to get you to buy something. If you’re small, there’s a product to make you large. If you’re depressed, there’s a product to make you happy. If you believed your spam and bought all the products, you’d be so rich and thrilled with your life, you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself.
Lately however, spam message are so convoluted and illiterate, they are meaningless. We’re all faced with completely stupid spam, and I just don’t get it. What does a subject line of xylk[spxt] have to do with anything and why would anyone even download it, much less buy something from this email?
Realistically, most people aren’t savvy enough to just download email headers, so they download every email as a matter of course. But most people also have spam filters either from their ISP or built into their email program, so they would never see such a blatant spam message.
Unfortunately, the theory I’ve read about these garbage or empty spam messages is that they are basically verifying that an address or a domain/server exists. So when you get a flurry of these meaningless spam messages in your in box, the only thing you can expect is more spam later. Oh goodie.
Of course, this brings up an obvious point, if the Bayesian filter in my $35 Spam Combat software can tell this garbage is spam, why can’t someone create spam “nets” to filter out this garbage before it gets to us and verifies our email address?
The Web has a number of major “backbones” through which almost all Internet traffic has to pass. Rather than letting all this spam through, couldn’t the great minds out there figure out a way to trap the spam before it gets to me?
So far no legal or technological “solution” has done anything, but increase the amount of spam I get. Spam is now seriously affecting business. It’s become almost impossible to get real email or say what you want in email.
Communication is a major part of business. Businesses can’t reliably sell products or communicate with customers anymore. Now that spam is affecting the bottom line, it’s time for big companies to put some real resources into combating the problem. It’s time to stop considering it a nuisance and DO something about it.
Susan Daffron
Editor
P.S. A few weeks after I wrote this, I took my own advice. I signed up for a service called Spam Arrest. So far, it’s working great. According to my statistics, the spam load on my accounts ranges from 80-95% spam. But now I don’t see any of it anymore. It’s a beautiful thing. If your curious, check out the demo using the link below (dial-up users beware…it’s a video, thus large, so you might want to just go to the site at SpamArrest.com and read about it the old fashioned way).
