Spam, Spam, Spam - December 26th 2006

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?

Postini, an internet security firm specializing in e-mail security, reports that spam increased by 73% in the last three months and that 93% of all e-mails sent are spam. Clearly spam is an escalating problem that clogs up the internet and it is way past time that it is effectively tackled.

On average I get between 100 and 200 spam e-mails every single day. Microsoft Outlook does a pretty efficient job of sending 99% of them to the junk folder whilst rarely trapping legitimate communications. I quickly scan the titles and senders of all messages in my junk folder, just in case and then delete the lot. Spam is not really a problem for businesses like ours, apart from the bandwidth consumed downloading them, as we know not to click on anything suspicious. As a result, I’m not overly bothered about getting all this junk, but what a waste of internet resources and bandwidth.

There have been various attempts to control spam e-mails in the past, usually by explicitly verifying the senders address after delivery. Unfortunately, these tend to be rather clumsy and because they are at the recipients end, are something of a band aid rather than a solution.

We also get spam over the telephone. These calls are usually easy to detect as they tend to come from 1 800 numbers and they will never leave a message. But; if you don’t pick up, your number stays on their database and they call again, usually the next day. The trick here is to answer, wait until you’re connected to someone and then hang up. Since more and more of these spam calls are recordings, there’s really no point ranting at them.

So what is the answer? Legislation against spam can be a fairly blunt instrument since many of the perpetrators operate from countries that have little interest in prosecuting them. US legislation along the lines of that which prevents the use of telephone lines (and by extension internet transmission lines) for gambling may hold out some hope but most of their legislative clout is obtained by preventing credit card companies from processing gambling payments. Spammers however are not directly taking credit card payments so it becomes much harder to prove the link.

I think that the answer to preventing spam is to put the burden of policing on the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). These can quite easily detect which of their clients are sending unusual quantities of e-mail and can quite easily detect the majority of spam passing through their systems. If spam is halted before it is delivered, the exercise becomes pointless and the spam phenomenon will pass into history. The only snag of course is that this gives ISPs rather a lot of authority to look into our private communications and to disrupt them if they see fit. The civil liberties advocates will doubtless have a field day with that one! But realistically, is this any more of an intrusion than the use of security cameras? The vulnerable in our society need protecting from computer and telephone crime just as much as they do from violence. Stamping out spam by making it ineffective has to be the best solution even though the details will need to be carefully worked out.