According to the experts, spam accounts for something like 50 per cent of all emails transmitted over the internet. Why is there so much? Put simply, because spam isn't working. The novelty of the net has worn off.
Internet users can spot junk emails a mile off. They're less likely to open spam, less likely to read it, and far less likely to actually respond to it.
Unless you're seriously Neanderthal, it's pretty obvious that a message headed "Free Viagra" or "Teen sluts" or "Penis enlargement" is not a legitimate email. As a result, the success rate of spam is down and spammers have to send more spam than ever before.
Spam has become so rife that many people are either opting out of email or checking it only once a week. All well and good for the individual, but businesses can't afford that luxury.
For corporations, spam has become a bigger problem than computer viruses.
For some, it's now a million-dollar problem. According to one estimate, each item of spam costs an organisation around $1 in terms of lost productivity, lost network bandwidth, and lost disk storage. While anti-virus filters have rendered the "script kiddies" and idiot fringe relatively harmless, anti-spam filters have proved far less effective. One problem is, they tend to block legitimate email traffic along with the spam. The spammers, meanwhile, have become more insidious, borrowing technology once found only among the hacking and virus lowlife.
In fact David Jones, global head of email filtering research at SurfControl, recently predicted that it wouldn't be long before it's spammers, not hackers and virus writers, who will be at the cutting edge of computer nasties. "Because there's a commercial driver behind it, there's very good reason for spammers who are making real money to be hiring programmers and technology and adding people to their staff."
Jones explained how spammers work around the inherent weaknesses of email filters. For example, many filters were written to tolerate some degree of malformation; in other words, emails with formatting errors. The assumption was that such malformations would have been accidental. So now many spammers insert malformations into their emails to get past the anti-spam filters.
Some spammers intersperse the "@" symbol right through their text. The idea is that anti-spam filters looking for key spamming words will accept them as genuine emails with errors.
Until now, the best anti-spam weapon has been held in reserve: legislation.
The US Government, it seems, intends to make certain spamming tricks a criminal offence.
For example, imagine a law that says "Thou shalt not falsify a header in a message and pretend you're somebody else." Which means it will be a criminal offence to send a message headed "Urgent re meeting" that some poor sod opens only to discover: "You can slam her with your extra thick Johnson." It would also become a criminal offence to conceal where you're sending the email from. Wishful thinking perhaps? Well, precedents exist to give us hope.
Those of us old enough to remember when the fax machine was a new toy can recall the overnight bombardments of junk faxes.
The entire roll over a weekend would be consumed by faxes from office suppliers, carpet cleaners and the like. That problem was nailed when many telecom authorities blew the whistle and deemed that sending unsolicited bulk faxes was a violation of one's contract to rent a phone line.
Junk mail and junk faxes have diminished. If governments can effectively hobble the spammers, so much the better for all of us. Not only are the spammers wasting our time and money, they are compromising the future of genuine online advertising.
