30 year old spam
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Although it seems hard to believe, spam is older than many of the people reading this blog entry. On May 3rd, according to New Scientist, will be 30 years old. It was then that one Gary Thuerk, in his role as a marketing man at the old Digital Equipment Corporation outfit, in his wisdom thought it would be a good thing to use this new fangled email and equally new fangled Arpanet network system to send an advertising message to all its users. Of course, back in May 1978, all its users equated to just 393 poor souls. Even in this small amount the spam was not best received and a number of complaints were received by Thuerk, as well as DEC getting a wrist slapping from the Arpanet admin.
Shame that it did not all end there, isn’t it? Today we have some 120 billion spam messages being distributed every single day across the Internet. Sapping resources in terms of manpower, finance and connectivity.
The 30 year birthday will not be getting a nice cake in the shape of a tin of luncheon meat from my wife, who happens to make very nice novelty cakes it has to be said, because I will not allow it. Not least as I don’t feel much like celebrating anything to with spam right now. Having what you might call a middling to high online profile, there is no point in trying to hide my email address. It has been out there too long, it is too widely known, and changing it does not make sense from the business perspective. Unfortunately this does mean that it gets hijacked every now and then by the spammers, as it has been for the last week or so in fact. About 80 percent of my incoming email, ironically once you have filtered out the spam, is made up of bounce messages from other people’s spam filters telling me they think the message I have sent them regarding a Rolex watch, penis powering drug or top financial tip might be a wee bit spammy. No s*** sherlock, really?
As usual, there is no real defence against this. Spammers will always use a readily available email address in order to try and circumvent filters, and these are chosen almost entirely at random. It could be you next week, or the week after. I have long since stopped chasing my tail and replying to folk in horror with ‘it wasn’t me’ messages or even trying to complain to ISPs and the like. Life is too short, time is too precious, and it does no good anyway. All you, and I, can do in these circumstances is weather the storm. A simple filtering rule in my email client to move bounce messages into the spam filter prevents me from having to wade through them with my delete finger primed for action. It’s about the best there is, really.
I do hope that within the next 30 years we have found a way to deal with the spam problem though. Be that through cultural revolt, legislative action or technological advance. I don’t actually care how spam gets stopped, as long as it does…
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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