Fighting Spam - Is It A Loosing Battle?

In June this year, Neo from WebProWorld started a very interesting discussion on spam. Although his post mainly revolved around forum spam, he did touch a very actual topic. Spam is not only limited to one medium only, spam is a much bigger problem than most people realise. We have to deal with forum spam, search engine spam, e-mail form spam, guest book spam (for those who still use guest books on their websites), article spam (yes article syndication can also turn into annoying spam), IRC spam, blog spam, comment spam, ebook spam, affiliate network spam, mobile phone spam, and of course the infamous unsolicited junk e-mails. I am sure I missed a couple, but I think you get the picture, spam has infiltrated almost every digital form of communication. No wonder people become pessimistic about fighting spam.

Some interesting reasoning came to light during this discussion on WebProWorld. One thing that sticks out its head in every discussion about spam is the apathetic approach towards spam. The attitude of "spam has always been a problem and will always be, live with it, accept the problem, you cannot change it, nor can you fix it". There is no merit in any of these statements, so lets take a closer look at them and I will show you why. "Spam has always been a problem". Really? Spam started to become a problem when people discovered its marketing potential. Spam wasn't a problem in the early days of the Web, we allowed it to become a problem by accepting the problem. Yes people got punished back then, but the spam volumes increased so much that it became impossible to punish every single spammer. Companies seem to be more concerned about treating the symptoms (with spam filters) than attacking the root of the problem. The right statement would be: "Spam has always been allowed to be a problem."

"Spam will always be a problem". Do we know for certain? Spam may eventually cause the collapse of the e-mail communication system and how do something remain a problem if the infrastructure is gone? If you believe that spam will always be a problem, then you obviously believe that whatever replaces e-mail will also fall victim to spam. Probably, but the creators of a new communication infrastructure will be complete idiots if they allow history to repeat itself. Spam has become a problem because of crippling legislation and in certain cases a total lack of legislation. How can we battle spam if legislation allows spammers to spam you until you tell them to stop? Its like allowing murderers to kill you until you tell them to stop. Can you see how ridiculous our current spam legislation is, spam will always be a problem, as long as we allow useless laws to regulate it.

"Live with it, accept the problem, you cannot change spam, nor can you fix it". People change, they adapt to their environment. Our kids are growing up with spam, so it will have a far smaller effect on them than it had on us. Those of us who grew up with commercials and ads displayed during our favourite TV shows, have developed a kind of blindness to these ads. Our children will also develop spam blindness over time, they will not respond to spam as easily as we do. It is a matter of education and removing the ignorance. Spam only works because people continue to respond to them.

According to an article by Michael Specter, Damn Spam The losing war on junk e-mail, spammers usually need to send a million e-mails to get fifteen positive responses, for the average direct-mail campaign, the response rate is three thousand per million. With a response rate as little as that you can easily see where spam could be heading if we can limit the response rate to zero. There will be no sense in sending spam anymore. People need to realize what is counted as a response and what they can do to limit accidental responses. Yes, simply by opening the e-mail already counts as a response in many cases.

Should we accept spam, should we live with it? Well you can easily ask, should we accept serious crimes like murder, rape and armed robbery? Just think what would happen if we had the same attitude towards these wrongdoings, crimes forbidden by civil law. What is civil law, it is actually common sense. We know it is wrong to steal money from someone else, but we are willing to live with a system where it is acceptable for other people to waste our money. That is exactly what spam is.

Conventional advertising demands an investment from the advertiser, making it an unattractive medium for cheap unsolicited bulk advertising. However in the case of spam, the consumer ends up paying for the advertising. Some spammers do not even pay a penny for sending these batches of spam, they have bot networks doing the work for them. These bot networks consist of consumer PC's infected with malware. The one consumer (the sender) unknowingly pays to send the spam and the other consumer (the recipient) unknowingly pays to receive the spam. So the consumer coughs up on both sides of the channel.

Brad Taylor, Gmail anti-spam engineer, sees the battle against spam as a war. One side eventually gets tired and anti-spam authorities cannot allow themselves to get tired in this struggle against spam. Sometimes the spammers get tired of trying to fool the spam filters and eventually give up, but only for a short space of time. During this rest period they regroup to find a loophole in the filtering system. Once they discover a way around it, they start spamming again. Stock market spam is a classic example of this roller coaster ride. Stock market spam was quiet for some time and suddenly they started popping up like weed via PDF attachments.

Spammers will always try to circumvent the system. Does this mean we should give up trying to beat them at their own game? Absolutely no, spammers annoy us with their unsolicited junk, so if we have means to our disposal to annoy them too, why not use it? The war against spam is far from over, the battle against spam is far from lost, I say bring it on.

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Beat Spam With Disposable Email Addresses

The World Wide Web, although a virtual world, is not actually a very safe place to be in. You can get your identity stolen. Your email address can provide identity thieves the wherewithal to take over your identity. There are many cases being reported and the financial loss is huge for the people who have had their identity stolen. So to protect yourself, think of using a disposable email addresses.

This is a near perfect solution to avoid spam mail. If you need to provide your email address in return for information, use this useful resource. Many of them destroy emails within a specified time limit. When you give out your real email address on the Web, you run the risk of getting your email box filled with spam. The only option you have is to select each spam item and delete it individually. What a waste of time and effort! But a disposable email addresses which offer a number of advanced features, you will never have this problem again. Instead of deleting all the spam, simply get a new account.

These email addresses can be created from a number of websites offering the service for free. Registration is simple and hassle free. Many of the websites offer a specified storage limit after which mail is destroyed. Some of them never expire unless you want them to. Some of these come with anti-spy ware installed. They also have the ability to keep track of the websites you have visited.

If you want to keep your identity a secret when you want to visit various discussion forums or sign up for member profiles, use a disposable identity. It makes life easier. Think of identity theft or having somebody access your personal details through spy ware! Use disposable email accounts without any qualms and stay worry free.

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Are SPAM Emails Legal?

Without question, spam is extremely annoying. No one wants to receive unwanted junk mail, or have it clog up their inbox. Nothing is more irritating that discovering you have 5 new e-mails, only to find that all of them are unsolicited messages and not the important email from a friend you've been anxiously waiting for.

Due to the fact that spam is so frustrating, and can be potentially harmful as some of these messages do contain viruses, you may be wondering if spam is illegal. Unfortunately, the answer is both yes and no. What this means is that spam you receive that clearly endorses an illegal service or product is against the law, but it is not illegal for someone to simply send electronic junk mail.

Although, there is thought of making laws regarding spam more strict, there are problems. For starters, it is difficult to identify spam. Though it is often recognized as unsolicited electronic mail, it cannot be roped in with the same laws that apply to telemarketers. Another issue is it can be challenging to reprimand those who offend because they can be very difficult to find. Spammers are very creative on how they send bulk messages to email addresses, making it complicated for the junk mail to be traced back to them. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for a spammer to mask their identity by using another e-mail subscriber's address to make it appear as if the message was sent by that individual.

Many people believe that spam, regardless of its purpose, should be prohibited. However, direct marketing industry professionals are concerned that if spam is made illegal, this would dramatically limit their ability to effectively market their services and products online. Additionally, many Internet users want the government to interfere with the World Wide Web as little as possible. It is believed better that commercial carriers agree on rules than have the government step in and create rigid laws. Furthermore, the net is used by people from countries across the globe, so if one country makes spam illegal, all the spammer has to do is move abroad.

Thus, in most cases, if you are receiving spam, you will not have any luck in pursuing legal action against the spammer. However, this doesn't mean you shouldn't do all you can to find out more about the person sending the junk and prevent them from bombarding your email with messages you don't want. Thus, be sure to run a reverse email lookup on the sender to find out more about them, and also notify the sender's ISP (Internet Service Provider) about the spam, as most ISPs will take action against those who use their services for disreputable purposes.

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