Alternatives to the all-spam diet

By Victor Keegan
THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Wednesday, Jun 18, 2003, Page 9

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is one of the few public figures to avoid the curse of the information age -- spam e-mail. This is because, as was admitted last week, he has no e-mail address. That is not a solution available to most people for whom e-mail has become a necessity.

Yet only six years ago, Andy Grove, chief executive of Intel, the microchip manufacturer, warned a stunned audience in Davos, Switzerland, that Europe was falling behind in the productivity race because use of e-mail and the Internet was only 20 percent of US levels.

Not any more. Europe has largely caught up and is suffering from an epidemic of e-mails. There have been gains in productivity -- instant access to peers, instant decisions and the ability to speedily send complicated documents and pictures. But these are in danger of being overwhelmed by the anxiety generated by hundreds of unopened e-mails, most of them junk, and the time it takes to get rid of them. And this is without counting the time wasted by employees e-mailing each other and friends. E-mails now follow people home, extend work to weekends and negate the therapeutic value of holidays by piling up in their hundreds to await your return.

Spam -- named after the famous British comedy Monty Python sketch -- is reckoned to account for almost half of all e-mails. According to the Radicati Group, a market research company, 14.5 billion spam messages will be sent each day this year (the equivalent of more than two for every person on the planet), rising to 58 billion by 2007.

This not only annoys recipients but also takes up valuable "bandwidth" on the Internet.

In the past six months the familiar diet of junk mail (clear your debts, take out a cheap mortgage, etc) has been joined by an avalanche of sex-related e-mails, including thrice-daily offers of Viagra or member enlargement, plus access to "horny" Web cameras. For most people these are merely an irritant -- but the messages are also received by children. A survey by Symantec, an Internet security company, of 1,000 net users between seven and 18 years of age showed that 47 percent had received e-mails with links to X-rated sites.

Although 51 percent said they were annoyed by such mail, 38 percent did not tell their parents what they had seen and 22 percent said their parents never talked to them about spam.

What can be done? The logical reaction -- to reply by asking to be taken off the e-mailing list -- should be avoided at all costs. It simply tells the spammer that yours is a "live" e-mail address and so worth exploiting further or selling to someone else. Super-spammers send up to half a billion messages a day. If only 100 recipients take the bait, it is worthwhile since e-mails cost next to nothing to output.

Most computers come with filtering software that siphons messages that have been mass mailed (plus any unwanted addresses) into a separate folder. This can be viewed from time to time to see if anything worthwhile has slipped through.

There are also companies such as Brightmail (www.brightmail.com) that sell counter-spamming software and voluntary movements such as Spamhaus (www.spamhaus.org) dedicated to eliminating the problem. But these approaches merely treat the symptoms, not the causes -- the spammers themselves.

The good news is that spam has become such a problem that politicians are waking up. The EU will have legislation in place by the end of the year under which bulk commercial e-mailers will be able to e-mail only those who have "opted in" to a mailing list. But that won't stop rogue operators who will merely move their operations offshore. In any case, Europe is responsible for less than 10 percent of offending e-mails.

Spam is overwhelmingly an American phenomenon, or more correctly a Floridian one. Steve Linford, of Spamhaus, estimates that fewer than 150 spammers are responsible for 90 percent of spam received in Europe and the US -- and at least 40 are located in the Boca Raton area of Florida.

After years of dilly-dallying, the US Congress is conducting hearings on the subject and several bills have been put forward. The trouble is that less than 5 percent of bills become law. But others are moving faster. The California Senate passed a bill last month outlawing junk e-mail, which will enable recipients of unauthorized messages to get state backing to sue for US$500 for each "slice of spam" received.

Last week the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked Congress for controversial powers to secretly investigate senders of unauthorized mail and also to track down spammers who dispatch their wares across international borders. FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle argues that "spam has become the weapon of choice for those engaged in fraud and deception."

In Britain, Derek Wyatt, chairman of the House of Commons all-party Internet group, is holding a "spam summit" in London on July 1.

He said on Thursday that the problem would not be solved until a worldwide body was able to enforce the necessary changes. Others say that if charges were levied for e-mail, spamming would no longer be economic and mass mailers would disappear. But such a move would be controversial -- it goes against the free-to-all spirit of the Web and would require radical changes in the infrastructure of the Internet.

It looks as though it will be some time before the problem is eliminated. Until then there is no alternative to palliative action.

Unless, of course, we take a lead from the prime minister.