Spam, the ugly tide of unwanted e-mail, rose to the fore of the last twelve months.

“Spam, Lovely Spam”

It’s probably not the legacy that the British comedy troupe Monty Python ever imagined. Then again, maybe it is. Why not? A generation was infected by their bizarre humor (“Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Know what I mean?”).

It started as a skit about overselling canned luncheon meat that cast them as cultural icons. In the skit, a waitress runs down the day’s menu, constantly interjecting a sales pitch for Spam. “Well, there's egg and bacon,” she starts, “Spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam.” All this as a chorus of Vikings sings “Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!” It truly captured the unwanted hard sell.

In 1994, the Internet was the realm of techies and government researchers. Any whiff of salesmanship or commercialization on e-mail or newsgroup postings immediately raised angry protested from the Net faithful. The Web was in its infancy. Home users hadn’t discovered the power of e-mail. There was an unwritten code of conduct. The sender of a sales message was usually “flamed,” or inundated with derisive messages meant to correct the heinous action. Then came the “Green Card Lottery” incident. A couple of lawyers in Arizona sent thousands of people an unsolicited message touting their offerings for immigrant workers. The unwanted sales pitch agitated the Internet community and the term “spam” quickly took root as the moniker for such a message.

From those humble beginnings, spam has exploded on the public conscience. But why go to the extreme of calling this past year “The Year of Spam”? Consider that spam is pandemic; it affects users on every continent. Spam is expensive; estimates range as high as $85 billion for the last year in the U.S. alone. And spam is creating systematic changes in the ways people use the Internet.

What is Spam?

It may help to start by defining what spam is and isn’t to understand why it has such an effect on people. And, there’s no better authority than the law to understand spam. The Iowa legislature actually passed an anti-spam code in 1999, while the Feds just signed the Can Spam Law in the last two weeks. At their most basic, both define that commercial e-mail messages must come from an actual e-mail address, must provide some way for the recipient to “opt out” of future messages, and must not contain fraudulent claims. Messages that don’t conform to these tests are considered spam. Spam is not simply a message that you don’t want, as there are legitimate ways that marketers can send you messages that meet the legal test provided in state and federal regulations.

A Global Issue

Spam is pandemic. The global ties created by the Internet have become clogged arteries thick with the soup of unwanted, unnecessary and downright filthy spam. Market research firm Radicati Group says that about 15 billion spam messages are sent out every single day. AOL reports that 80% of incoming e-mail traffic is spam. That’s a lot of deleting.

Spam appears to be coming from all over the globe. The U.S. is considered the worst, accounting for 60% of messages set. However, Russia, Canada and Nigeria are among the major contributors to the problem. The Federal Trade Commission claims that 68% of all fraudulent foreign money offers come from Africa, while 61% of prize and sweepstakes offers originate with Canadian companies. The fact that spam crosses so many borders also makes it difficult to fight. However, many of the laws and regulations include ways for the U.S. and others to cross borders to shut down spammers.

Hidden Costs

Spam is expensive. On the surface, it’s not hard to estimate the toll spam is taking on productivity. At work, employers measure the time employees take to handle spam. And that’s all well and good for employees, but what about the time lost at home deleting? As spam fighting tools like filters become our best defenses, we can add any costs for these tools to the war fund. To most of us, however, there are untold costs that we’ll eventually pay. AOL, Yahoo!, the cable company and your local Internet Service Provider are all paying for spam through increased server storage, data communications, technical support and software costs. And now, they’re moving to include filters to fight spam for each of us. Plus, they’re being driven to lower cost services by more and more competition.

Disturbing Trends

Spam has systematically changed the ways we use the Internet. The non-profit Pew Internet and American Life Project released their study called “Spam: How It Is Hurting Email and Degrading Life on the Internet” in October. This seminal study points to two frustrations that we as Internet users face: wading through the muck created by spam, and actually fighting the spammers. The daily grind through messages has led a quarter of all e-mail users to reduce their user of e-mail. It may seem subtle, but this is having an effect on legitimate senders of e-mail. Businesses, organizations and churches that had just found an effective, inexpensive way to deliver information are reconsidering their use of e-mail.

Which brings us to the more troubling change brought about so far by spam. The pervasive attitude is defeatism. Spam is being accepted as a way of Internet life and users are simply finding ways to keep it out of sight. For all the complaints, there’s been woefully little real action against spammers. We haven’t, we won’t or we can’t fight it. We’ve simply resigned ourselves to accept it and to find ways through it.

Fighting Spam

The best spam fighting tools are filters that look for messages that appear to be spam. Filters can reside either on your PC or at your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Through various methods, spam filters evaluate incoming e-mail and decide whether you should see it or not. Most major ISPs have some sort of filtering technology in place.

The trouble with the filter approach is that it doesn’t get at the root of the problem of spam. In fact, it may actually mask the problem. We’d be better served to stop the sleaze balls that send the garbage. This lofty aim is the goal of the wave of spam legislation. But legislation is for naught without real enforcement. In turn, I believe it’s up to users to help the fight by identifying spammers to their ISPs. These ISPs, in turn, have to step up their fight against spam.

The Chase Is On

The chase began in earnest this December 18th when New York’s Attorney General and Microsoft each filed suits against some of the largest identified spammers in the country. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer wants to “drive them into bankruptcy” through claims that could reach into the tens of millions of dollars, according to the New York Times.

That’s the kind of tough action that’s needed to discourage spammers from clogging up our e-mail The Internet is still a frontier, with changing borders and adaptive codes of conduct. Just as the worst elements of the Wild West were tamed, the snake oil peddlers of the Net will be bounced out of town on their ears.