In a world of uncertainty, there is one thing you can be certain of: when you arrive at the office in the morning, spam will be there, filling up your inbox, yet again.
"Care to buy cheap pharmaceuticals, direct from Korea? How about some wholesale camouflage underwear, or a lifetime supply of bubble wrap? Not interested? Oh well, we`ll try again tomorrow then, same time, same place."
Since commercial spam starting picking up in 1994, it has become an ever-increasing thorn in our side. Latest statistics indicate that it accounts for around 60% of the world`s e-mail. Worse still, this plague is increasing rapidly in SA, as spammers seek new territories to plunder.
In a country like ours - where bandwidth is worth its proverbial weight in gold - the situation is simply worsened. I can only imagine how much faster the Internet would be if e-mail traffic was more than halved.
Is this the reason that we view spammers with such contempt? At a recent Internet conference, a spam marketer was invited to plead the case for spamming before a baying audience. Not since the Salem witch trials has a human been treated with such disrespect and abhorrence.
Cries of "you`re stealing my bandwidth" resounded in the hall. I would have felt sorry for the guy, but I was too busy throwing rotten cabbages at him from the back row.
From my personal perspective, my hatred of spam stems from the fact that it leaves me powerless to respond.
Damian Clarkson, junior journalist, ITWeb
It never ceases to amaze me how spammers actually make money from their trade. After all, how many people do you know that actually even bother to open such mail, let alone respond? But with the unbelievable volumes of unsolicited mail sent out, the hit/miss ratio need not be anything like respectable for them to rake in a profit.
Recently apprehended spammer Jeremy Haynes said only one in 30 000 needed to respond to his mails in order to garner his total profits of around $24 million.
But who is that one person in 30 000? I cannot imagine why anyone would respond to a request for cash from a complete stranger. There is no way of knowing if this person/company can be trusted. If I decided to buy Viagra, there`s no way I am going to trust some guy named Dave, who claims to know a cheap supplier in Tijuana, Mexico.
Besides, most of the offerings in spam are available from legitimate shops. And there you can get some sort of guarantee.
From my personal perspective, my hatred of spam stems from the fact that it leaves me powerless to respond. If I click to unsubscribe from a spammers` list, all I am doing is confirming my existence to them and can expect a bombardment of spam the next day.
With junk mail - which is always marked as such - I can tear up the offending paper into tiny little shreds and laugh gleefully as the tatters fall to the floor. Strange as it may sound, that gives me satisfaction of some sort. But I doubt my boss would take kindly to me grabbing my monitor and smashing it on the ground in protest of the evil spammers.
So what can be done to at least minimise its effects? It would probably be a tad extreme to enact legislation making it illegal for the public to respond to spam. After all, it isn`t the public`s fault that these messages are clogging up servers. But we are the ones creating the demand and any response to spam is an invitation for spammers to further cripple our connectivity.
Sadly, it seems unlikely that the war against spam will be won any time soon, if ever. Nothing feeds human innovation and motivation more than greed, and with literally millions to be made through spamming, the plague is set to continue. It has become another negative aspect of society that we have subconsciously conceded defeat to, accepting that it will always be there. Just like crime, poverty and Celine Dion.
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