Bug watch: Spam with everything

Spam - unsolicited commercial email - has become the scourge of the internet age. Every day millions of unwanted messages are sent to individuals all over the world in an attempt to get them to buy products or services. And usually these messages are of a dubious nature, featuring money-making schemes, gambling offers or links to pornography websites.

Research conducted by Gartner in 1999 found that 25 per cent of spam is 'adult' while a further 37 per cent consists of 'get rich quick' schemes.

The spam problem is borne from the fact that it costs the sender very little. In fact, no other form of advertising costs the advertiser so little and the recipient so much. One million email addresses can cost as little as 63p and one million spams take about four hours to send by dial-up at a cost of only £2.40.

This makes spam purely and simply a numbers game, as the sender can make a profit if just one person buys a product or service covering the dial-up cost and the amount paid for the list of email addresses.

To make matters worse, spam is extremely difficult to trace back to the sender as the perpetrators take steps to hide their genuine email address.

Growing problem

Spam is currently a bigger problem in the US than in Europe. In the US, spam has already proved very costly in both time and money to ISPs, businesses and consumers.

One major ISP reported receiving 1.8 million spams a day from a promotions company until it obtained an injunction. Working on the assumption that each user spent 10 seconds identifying and discarding spam, a total of 5,000 hours per day of connection time was being wasted via just one ISP.

The European Commission estimated in 2001 that the cost of spam globally was £6.4bn a year in connection charges alone - an average of nearly £12 per person among the world's 544 million internet subscribers.

Unfortunately, the situation can only get worse. The longer you keep the same email address the greater the probability of getting spammed. Jupiter estimates that 268 billion advertising email messages will be sent in 2005 - representing 22 times greater volume than in 2000.

In addition, many online marketers are known to be developing engines capable of serving 100 million messages per day - a capacity the EU estimates could soon expose consumers to 3,000 marketing emails daily.The spam wars

The war against spam is being waged on three fronts - via the law, social solutions such as activist groups, and computer science.

There have been various attempts at passing laws or adapting existing laws in an attempt to control a deteriorating situation. Unfortunately, merely passing a law is not enough to prevent a problem.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that spammers can be very hard to track down and the costs of subsequently mounting a successful prosecution can be inordinate. It also makes the assumption that the sender of unwanted email is within the law's jurisdiction. Spam, however, is an international problem as each and every mass email can make its way to many different countries.

On the social front some ISPs and activists have got together to create public lists of known offenders, which can include ISPs that have been deemed guilty of allowing unwanted email to pass through their systems. But there has been some controversy over the effectiveness of this approach, particularly since it is quite easy for even a well-run ISP to unwittingly harbour a spammer for a short period.

Cutting through the spam

• Beware of purchasing spam-advertised products. Aside from encouraging spammers, this makes more personally identifiable information (e.g. name, address, phone number, credit card numbers, etc.) available to them. It will also guarantee that you will get more spam.
• Refrain from using the reply or remove option. Some senders may remove your address, but others may flag your email address as 'live' and send you more spam or even sell your address to other spammers.
• Use a public email address while online. Set up and use a public email address, which may either be an additional address from your ISP or a free web-based email address. Use this email address when participating in newsgroups, joining contests or anytime that your email is requested by a third party online. Potential spam will go to your public email address instead of your private email address.
• Don't post your email address online. You'd be surprised how often you use your email address for newsletter subscriptions, in chat rooms or to join online groups. Before you post your email address, know whether it will be displayed or used. Then use a public email address when necessary.