Spam - The Unstoppable Monster

Spam affects the lives of nearly anyone who uses email nowadays. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t get offered an enlargement to my privates, hot tips for US shares, herbal remedies that “will make her love me again” or tempting plans to smuggle $1,000,000 (One Million) out of Nigeria. Then there is the flip-side of the coin – the email sent by me that sits in recipients’ spam filters for no apparent reason and thus gets missed. The result – an immense amount of irritation.

Such was the quantity of spam coming into This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it that I simply scrapped the address completely and put on an auto-response in case anyone genuine tried to use it. Why did they target that address? Simply because it was displayed as text on the web – something I have put an end to for the replacement address (it is now an image and therefore harder to read).

The spam society raises two major questions. Why do they do it and what can we do about it?

Firstly, why do they do it? The simple answer is because it is a free form of marketing with a massive audience. Currently around 71% of global email traffic is spam. That is a massive amount of email and it probably comes from relatively few people. While 99.99% of people would never dream of packing their bags for West Africa to help out a nice gentlemen with his diamonds, some people do. Just one bite out of the tens of millions that they send it to and the activity has made a profit.

Secondly, what can we do about it? The easy answer is to shrug and say “nothing.” Since the emergence of the Sobig and Mydoom viruses in 2003, spam is distributed by genuine people’s PCs without their knowledge. Therefore it can not be traced back to the original source.

However, the Dutch have managed to cut spam by 85% through taking some active measures. But surely they must have a team of thousands on the case?? Erm… well… no. They have a team of 5 people. The fact is that rather than just introducing a law and ignoring it, they actually go for the spammers and drive them out.

In the UK, The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 have yet to result in a single prosecution. That is, in my humble opinion, pathetic.

There are some pretty simple things that could be done. If a spam email points you to a website, then that site should be shut down and the owners prosecuted. If the owners are based in Timbuktu and uncatchable, the website should be barred from all ISPs in the UK. That should then be made big news to deter anyone else who fancies a go. If the email is trying to push up share prices, then trading in that company’s shares should be suspended. If it claims to be from the Irish National Lottery, then the scammers should be pursued and brought to justice.

But most of all, there is something really simple that should be done. Please can everyone invest in a virus scanner – they don’t cost much and will put an end to using 3rd party computers to distribute the rubbish.

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