SPAM: a fatality of interacting with the web
Today, let’s have a look at the utmost plague of contemporary life at the computer: SPAM. I am way above average in terms of the spam I receive according to the stats below. And I practice the art of mailbox management (always process all emails received with one of the following actions: delete, respond, flag for later retrieval, never ignore an email) hence the additional aggravation.
SPAM seems to be getting worse. And I have a wide definition of SPAM. It englobes most non-sollicited mail even “legitimate” one. Like you, I have many email accounts and some of them have been active since the beginning of times (modern times, circa 1999). I am active on the Internet (to say the least) and I have filled out forms from New York Times, Technology Review, Google, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, The Globe and Mail, World Screen, Web Buyer’s Guide, Digital Signage Today, Wired, ZDnet (what a mistake), JOOST, SKYPE, facebook, Digg, Zinio, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, NHL and others. Add to this list all the software we register online.
Only a few enforce the “no email form third party” option. That field should read:
“no matter what you do, we will most certainly send you advertising of some sort from our brave sponsors who in their magnanimousness have really agreed to support this web site to get at you in any way they can, especially ignoring the no email from third party clause that we include to legally protect ourselves from infringements on the privacy of your records and your right to know how we share the information we have on you”.
Hey the Internet is a public place. Don’t ever forget that. Privacy, huh?
I think organizations are so happy to obtain an email that they flood it forever with conferences, promotions, webinars, events, exhibitions, training tours, products, updates, documents, specials and what have you. I suspect the emails pulled are also shared among departments. Perhaps I should stop reading white papers, responding to surveys, participating in betas, subscribing to communities, registering software, voting online, commenting on blogs, reacting to editorials and simply put, interacting with the web. No way.
Marketing should be more targeted, responses (and lack there of) should be measured and message frequency tweaked according to receiver’s behaviour. Current practices should be refined and automated with AI. Start-up money needed.
Firewalls should join the SPAM resistance. Email software should be more intelligent. SPAM sources should be scanned by spambots, matched against email response. Say more than a 1,000 users have filed certain messages in their SPAM folder, that information should be sent back to a web service, compiled and these IP adresses blocked in a live Firewall IP table or at least filtered by all email software instantly… P2P spam filtering. Learning from all. Seed money needed.
Apple’s MAIL is fairly intelligent when it comes to filtering time wasting messages. Although why anything with the word Viagra would still make it to my mailbox by now really puzzles me. I also use Microsoft’s Entourage because it has so much more features than MAIL. Both are not perfect. Why are they not training and learning constantly? Why isn’t there artificial intelligence built into such a crucial application? I want my mailTV, so I can zap.
Here are some SPAM statistics:
40% of all email are considered SPAM.
12.4 Billion spams are sent daily.
Are you the visual type? Look at this, the Junk-o-Meter.
The only person I know of who does not receive any spam is John Dvorak (famous for his infamous “I get no spam”). At least he’s suggesting an Apache trick to reduce blog spamming.
I’m amazed, astonished, astonied, astounded, stunned, dumfounded, flabbergasted, stupefied, thunderstruck, goggle-eyed, openmouthed, popeyed, startled and honestly jiggered (www.synonym.com) at the amount of spam that makes it on the network of all networks. Variants of V!4gr4 almost always make it to my mailbox. Whatever happened to the whitelist idea?
In the mean time, here is something to consider when you’ll be filling out a form on line asking you to:
“absolutely provide a real email as an activation link will be sent to the email you provide and it must be valid, blah, blah, blah”
It may help reduce the risk of SPAM and the ensuing side effects of mailbox congestion. Get some rest, rent a movie and clean your delete key!
