| Spam is the cancer of the Internet. Although this is
not how spam is officially defined, many victims would agree
with the metaphor: spam proliferates at an alarming rate
and encroaches on this vital communication organ called email,
causing anything from mere nuisance to forcing some addresses
out of existence. There is no sure cure and sometimes the
treatment is as damaging as the disease itself.
And yet its causes, perpetrators and mechanisms are not
much of a mystery. Unlike medicine, where man competes
with nature in deciphering elusive diseases, in the case
of spam, man competes with himself: what a spammer does,
an anti-spammer will undo, then the spammer will find a
better trick, and so on in a spiraling competition with
no end in sight.
Why spam is different (or is it?)
In technical terms, spam is unsolicited email sent from
one source to huge numbers of email addresses with whom
no prior business relationship existed. Usually the purpose
of spam is to make a profit from the email recipients
to whom services or products are peddled. Other than
the relative easiness and the scale on which it can be
propagated, spam, in its essence, is not different from
junk mail or door-to-door soliciting or even conventional
advertising. Do we really want or enjoy all those commercials
(true, the advertisers pay for the programs – but
not for our wasted time). Do the distributors of all
the ads that “grace” our urban structures
ask us for permission? How about all the junk mail we
get? Like spam, all these marketing tools are based on
cold statistics, market projections and psychological
manipulation of the targeted audience.
However, spam gets much more of a public outcry than the
other, more established methods enumerated above. One reason
for this reaction is that spam does not have the “respectability” of
other forms of marketing. Because it is cheap, anonymous
and easy to produce, it is most often used by low quality
businesses, for dubious or illegal products and services.
Unlike other unwanted marketing material, which can be
easily discarded by tuning to another channel or simply
tossed away, spam can have some very tangible effects that
require the victim’s action and effort beyond just
pressing the delete button.
Another strong reason for the loudness of the reaction
is that spam eats at the corporate bottom line: it causes
lost productivity as staff are forced to spend time sorting
out more and more email; it adds costs related to implementation
of protection means on corporate servers; it clogs network
communication and takes up storage space; and many times
it causes confusion and disgust among employees.
In perpetuum…
The creativity of the spammers competes with that of the
anti-spammers. Spam comes to us under many disguises,
from many and elusive sources and locations. At the same
time, countless products claim to be the ultimate anti-spam
antidote. Consortiums of companies get set up to deal
with the problem. Scores of websites are dedicated to
either spammers or the spammed. Filters and technical
tips on how to deal with the problem abound. But what
a filter is able to stop now, it may no longer be able
to stop a few hours later because some spammer might
have since figured out and implemented a way to bypass
it. The biggest drawback of filters, however, is that
they cannot guarantee legitimate emails won’t also
filtered away.
The spam phenomenon is deeply rooted in the mechanisms
of the market economy and in the psyche of the public.
Its big wheel is span by the relentless pursuit of profit
by a number of would-be entrepreneurs, coupled with the
appetite for bargains of some segments of the Internet
community. The bet of the game is that out of an audience
of millions, even a response measuring a fraction of a
percentage will still generate a profit for the spammer.
On the spammed side, interest, curiosity, and, most of
all, ignorance, are always guaranteed to fill in that fraction
of a percentage - as one cynic put it, “the trick
is old, the stupid is new”. This explains why it
is so difficult to stop spam: spam manifests itself as
a technical problem but it is in fact a phenomenon with
a strong economic and psychological motivation. Therefore,
no technical solution will ever be a 100% cure.
Stopping spam: Mission impossible?
While the technical measures get the most visibility among
the anti-spam efforts, the battle is also fought on the
legal front. The debate on spammers’ right to free
speech vs. the spammed right to privacy is still a hot
issue. Despite that, anti-spam legislation has been enacted
in the last few years in most North American jurisdictions;
enforcing it is still a challenge, mainly because spammers
are very good at dissimulating their true identity.
But there is another battleground that is not so often
mentioned: education. Once the public understands the underpinning
of spam and stops reacting to it, this vehicle will become
useless as a means of selling and making a profit. While
this is an uphill battle, every individual decision of
not opening, replying to and forwarding spam counts.
Human creativity – be it at the service of a good
cause or a not so good cause - cannot be stopped. Spam
is (among other things) an expression of creativity and
takes no exception to that rule: without solid grounding
in business and personal ethics, technical or legal means
will fail to solve the problem satisfactorily. And people
will continue to spend time, energy and creativity in this
wasteful race.
Tatiana Andronache is IT technical staff
for a large information technology company in Toronto, Canada.
She can be reached at tatiana.andronache@sympatico.ca
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