A recent study commissioned by Symantec found that four out of every five kids with Internet access receive inappropriate spam e-mail. The children, aged 7 to 18, received spam e-mail offering gambling, loan programmes and pornographic materials. They said they felt "uncomfortable and offended when seeing improper e-mail content". Don`t we all.
PC users and companies are starting to tear their hair out about the overwhelming flood of spam, and are talking about extreme measures to stop it.
Tracy Burrows, news editor, ITWeb
I get hundreds of daily offers to enlarge bits I don`t have, reduce the rest of me and make lots of extra money in my spare time. If I like, I could take up one of the regular offers to buy 15.7 million e-mail addresses. I also have the honour of being considered a worthy business partner by half the citizens of Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Sometimes I accidentally open mail with a subject line like: "News", only to find the news in question relates to a new way to use a sex toy. And then there are the explicit invitations to view students, girls, guys and children doing things I don`t even want to contemplate. I haven`t opened the mails, the subject lines say enough.
The download time on this tide of sludge via a home dial-up modem is excruciating. The deleting time is minimal, but if I hurry through the process I often see - too late - that I`ve included a long-awaited e-mail in the 'delete` block and have to watch helplessly as it disappears with the rest.
The US-based Anti-Spam Research Group confirms the average PC user`s suspicion that the problem is getting worse daily. In its report on the scope of the problem, the group says over 5.5 million spam mails are sent out daily. The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (Cauce) says about 30% of e-mails sent out are unsolicited commercial e-mail. US-based Radicati Group says the daily spam figure is closer to a breathtaking 2.3 million, and expected to soar to 15 billion by 2007.
Whatever. We all know it`s a lot. And it`s growing. Every PC-bound worker I know blanches as they turn on their PC after an absence from the office these days. There is a moment`s silence as the PC starts up, a sharp intake of breath and inevitable yelp about how many hundreds of e-mails have arrived, and what proportion of them are "real" messages. We seem to average around four "real" mails to 160-odd spam mails.
Determining how much this costs the end-user and the corporate in terms of lost time and network snarls isn`t easy, but most guesstimates end up at several hundred dollars a year per user. Cauce says that according to the European Commission, the costs of spam to businesses and consumers have been estimated at $8 billion per year. That`s not including the cost of therapy and tranquillisers that will be needed to cope with the inevitable growth in "spam rage".
PC users and companies are starting to tear their hair out about the overwhelming flood of spam, and are talking about extreme measures to stop it - blocking all mass mail, abandoning e-mail accounts and installing every filter that comes on to the market. For the average, tech-illiterate home user with no IT department to help block spam, the problem is even worse. Legislators and activists` groups are doing everything they can to stop it too, but nothing appears to work very well or for very long.
The only sure-fire way to get away from spam, it seems, is to switch off the PC and go fishing. Which is nice, but rather defeats the object of living in the IT age.
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