When Monty Python sang about it, it was funny. (At least it was funny 40 years ago.) When it takes over your inbox, it’s frustrating. And when someone gets sucked in and loses data, money, or both, it’s a disaster — and a crime that the constabulary can’t seem to get a handle on.
If you think spam has been increasing… well, you’re right. This report in Baseline Magazine notes that 97.5% — 97.5%!! — of email in December and January was spam. [Note: Unfortunately, it's another one of those annoying built-in-Flash-because-the-developer-thinks-it's-cool slide shows.]
The latest trick is manipulating the sent time so that if you keep stuff in your inbox sorted by date, the spam winds up spread throughout the folder; you can’t just pick off the newest stuff on top.
Almost 10% of the spam came from the US. As a US citizen, I find that both embarrassing and infuriating; how is it we can’t catch the folks within our own borders?
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The worst part is that about eight years ago Microsoft proposed what still looks like an elegant way to kill spam: make the spammers “pay” for their emails. [The link is to a generally readable page; it then has links to highly technical research papers with more detail.] Microsoft didn’t originate the idea, which has been around since at least 1992, but they actively promoted it for a time.
There was considerable discussion about the idea in the early part of the decade — but there was a lot of “oh, it’s Microsoft, so I don’t like it” and “this isn’t absolutely perfect, so let’s not do it.” That’s the stuff that kills projects, and we’re paying for it today.
Or as Monty Python notes, on the menu “there’s spam, egg, sausage, and spam; that’s not got much spam in it.” Well, now we’re up to spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, egg, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam. (Yes, that’s the proportion.) As far as I’m concerned, that’s got too much spam in it.
