If you’ve been a regular Internet user like me, since the early days of NCST’s shakti and soochak, and VSNL’s first shell accounts, chances are your e-mail address has travelled around a bit. In those pre-Webmail days of newbie innocence, you’d probably given away your primary e-mail address at obscure sites, as I had, while signing up for some genuinely attractive service or info. Spam, also known as unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE), was a rarity then; the evil marketeers hadn’t yet caught on. Back then, wickedness was in a closed group that you’d enter by choice rather than chance. If at all you were a victim of spam, you were likely a part of Usenet, where spamming amounted to newsgroup cross-posting—annoying no doubt, but just another day of tomfoolery in geek paradise.

Of course all that’s nostalgia now. Spam today is the ugly, obnoxious, in-your-face reality of the Internet at large. Whether you’ve publicly shared your personal e-mail id or not, it’s quite likely that you receive junk mail by the screenful, from get-rich-quick schemes to anatomical enhancement creams; impossible deals to preposterous marketing spiels; erotic pics to idiotic ‘inspirational’ limericks. You might have noticed an increase in spam on VSNL mail these days. And of course, Hotmail with its many millions of users, has long been the favourite target of spammers. If you’re on other mail services or ISPs, spamming is usually directly proportional to popularity, or how careless you’ve been with your id.

In the past, my approach to spam had always been one of delete-and-bear-it. I reckoned that doing anything beyond that was just a further waste of time. But watching a friend’s pre-teen daughter innocently scroll through obscene headers on her personal Inbox the other day, it hit home what a horrifying menace spam can actually be. Since then, with a bit of research, I’ve found several more reasons why we should all be doing whatever we can to stamp out spam.

Unlike junk mail the mailman brings to your door, you have to bear the cost of e-mail spam, directly and indirectly. Studies have shown that about 30 percent of e-mail on large ISPs is spam. This means slowing down of the service, unnecessary additional investment in bandwidth, locking up of server CPU time if filtering systems are used, and in a worst case, service outages and ISP shutdowns. The costs are invariably borne by the Internet community as a whole, while the spammer gets away with little or no expenditure. And if you’re accessing your e-mail on the move, via a cybercafe or a mobile phone, boy, wouldn’t you like to wring those spammers’ necks! It doesn’t help any that almost all global spammers are scamsters, thieves or peddlers of illegal products and services.

Anti-spam laws have been extremely difficult to formulate, and even where they do exist, they’re toothless tigers. Some states of the US have laws that allow spam which provides an opt-out clause (so you can unsubscribe). That’s okay if you’d opted in to begin with, but why should you have to opt-out of something you never asked for? And should you hit that reply button, be sure that your mail will either bounce, or be ignored, or confirm to the spammer that your e-mail id is “live”—opening the floodgates to spamming you senseless.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that CAUCE, the voluntary Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (www.cauce.org), has an Indian chapter (www.india.cauce.org). Although the local website doesn’t show much sign of current activity, chapter president Suresh Ramasubramanian says that the priority for now is to increase awareness about the ills of spam among the ISP community before lobbying with the government for anti-spam policies and their enforcement. Indeed, VSNL has an address, abuse@vsnl.com, at which you can report spammers. Don’t know what action they take, but at least it’s a step better than Satyam, which advises you to “block the sender’s mail id in your mail client.”

Meanwhile, as law formulation takes its course, is there no choice but to sit back meekly and be spammed? No way! For starters, if you’re on VSNL, report every spamming incident every time. Local spamming is still nascent, and we just might be able to nip it in the bud this way. If the spamming company seems legit, make sure you let them know they’re doing wrong and that you will boycott them. Take the time to understand the filtering options that your e-mail client or Webmail service offers, and then set them all up correctly—it could save you a lot of time and grief later. There are spam-blocking software products you can buy, like McAfee’s SpamKiller, but I guess doing so would be a last resort. If you have the inclination, there’s a lot more you can learn at the CAUCE site, or at spam.abuse.net. Check out the superb spamFAQ maintained by rocket scientist Ken Hollis at digital.net/~gandalf/spamfaq.html. The ominous-sounding ‘Death to Spam’ page by Steven Rimmer at Alchemy Mindworks (www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/nospam.html) is technical, satirical and highly readable.

I’ll leave you with a thought from CAUCE: “Spam is based on theft of service, fraud and deceit as well as cost-shifting to the recipient... Any business that depends on stealing from its customers, preying on the innocent, and abusing the open standards of the Internet is—and should be—doomed to failure.” Are you going to join in the fight to stamp out spam? I certainly am.

- Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com