An individual who identifies himself as an African businessman pleads for my
urgent assistance. An unknown pharmaceutical company pitches me a potion it
claims will enlarge one of my appendages. Someone named Amy218 offers to
sell me pictures of "barely legal teens."
A weird bunch of offers, to be sure, but then I'm used to it. My e-mail inbox
-- like everyone else's -- is filled with spam  like this day in and day out.
And it's only getting worse.
We're Drowning
Spam has moved past its status as a minor irritant. It has grown into a force
that threatens to turn our e-mail boxes into clogged cesspools of marketing
offers.
Research firm Gartner estimates that junk e-mail volume has grown at least fivefold
in recent years. E-marketers can buy a database of 10 million e-mail
addresses for about US$150, and replicating such a list is virtually free.
With insidious economics like this, spam will continue to grow like a weed in
summer, wasting ever-increasing amounts of users' time and costing
corporations a fortune in misspent resources.
Fighting Back
The desire to stem this drowning tide of Viagra offers has created a call
to action, and that's where the spam issue gets tricky. Like killing the monster in a Japanese horror movie, destroying spam seems nearly impossible.
Politicians, seeing an opportunity to grandstand, have proposed legislation:
The "Controlling the Assault of Non Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act" (CAN SPAM) would require unsolicited e-mail to include a method for
recipients to opt out. This bill or a variation of it will likely be voted on
in 2003.
But passing anti-spam legislation, while perhaps well intended, is like
passing a law against rain. Words on paper won't stop it.
First, an increasing number of spammers now operate outside U.S. shores.
Will a Malaysian spam outfit quiver in fear at a U.S. law? Second, the
Constitution's free speech protection says -- fortunately -- that any madman
can distribute leaflets with no governmental censorship. It wouldn't take
much legal maneuvering by a well-heeled spammer to point out that free
speech extends to the Internet.
(Not that the the Internet will ever need the U.S. Constitution to protect
its free speech. For every AOL-style profanity blocker, there are a million
crazies eager to sing the praises of kinky behavior with farm animals. That's the beauty
of the Internet. God bless it.)
Godzilla Must Die
Okay, we can't wish spam away, and we can't legislate it away, so what are we to
do? The only answer is to fight the monster with the same weapon it uses:
technology. These technological solutions come in three forms: ISPs, e-mail software and blacklists. (continued...)
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