Cyberspace clogged with spam: Is serendipity now a mirage?

ND Batra, The Statesman, Asia News Network, Calcutta

There is some one in Nigeria, South Africa or somewhere else who desperately wants to strike a multimillion-dollar deal with me. Why me, I wonder, and then I find to my consternation that someone has picked up one of my female students' names and wants to enlarge my body parts. Every time I block the address in my e- mail inbox, another incarnation of the same person appears with a new subject heading.

A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from Susie with the heading, Fall Update, and I thought a publisher's representative wanted to update me on my fall semester textbooks. But it turned out to be, well, you have guessed it, a newer topless model with more to show than just erotic dreams.

But imagine the plight of teenagers' parents who can't stop worrying who is spamming their children and why. There is plenty of e-mail from mortgage lenders, debt reduction experts and vendors of all kinds of fancy things.

Spam is a curse of the digital age. It strikes anyone who moves into cyberspace as most of us do for information, business or entertainment. Spam irritates and wastes time but worse, it prevents you from the benefit of serendipity, a chance discovery, an unexpected e-mail from an unknown person whose ideas might intrigue you. A few days ago, I was impulsively about to hit the "Delete" key thinking a mail to be one of those schemes to make me rich or more masculine, but something prompted me to check out. It turned out to be a publishers proposal which I would have missed.

Could there ever be a smart software that would sniff my incoming e-mail and alert me against those rare moments of serendipity from the tons of daily dross that chokes my inbox? Well, the temptation of serendipity explains why most people open their e-mail thinking there might be something interesting; and that's why spammers continue faking subject headings and changing their addresses. Deceptive information is at the heart of the problem, which prevents legitimate businesses reaching their prospective customers. There's no reliable estimate about the dollar amount being drained out of business productivity but there's no question that spam clogs corporate and educational networks and distracts users with scams and pornography.

But there's good news. Spam has ceased to be only your bugaboo or mine, as big corporations are entering into the fray because it is hurting their business. The two-pronged battle is being fought by means at which Americans do their best: Litigation and technology. Microsoft, for example, has filed 15 lawsuits in the U.S. and Britain against spammers, individuals and corporations, who have been sending billions of unsolicited messages through its systems. But what kind of success the company with deep pockets would achieve is anybody's guess, especially if freedom of speech becomes the issue. Anyone is free to send me unsolicited mail through the post office and I get plenty of junk mail, which I accept without much protest or pain because I dump it in the garbage can without opening it. The Supreme Court has not spoken whether spam is protected free speech or restricted commercial speech.

Probably more effective than litigation is the promise of technological innovation which Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, hopes to cash, as he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, by "developing more effective anti-spam filters and other technologies that build on our research into fields such as machine learning -- the design of systems that learn from data and grow smarter over time." Smart systems would adapt to the changing tactics of spammers and kill spam at the server level. Microsoft's MSN and Hotmail claim to block 2.4 billion messages a day but that is only a drop in the bucket.

Other companies such as AOL, Yahoo! and Earthlink too are fighting spammers, but with myriad e-mail accounts, nimble spammers keep moving from one service to another. Roving spammers who fake their identities and sneak into systems undetected are the greatest menace.

One of the industry suggestions is that the Federal Trade Commission should create guidelines for best e-mail practices and those who find the guidelines too constraining must use ADV (advertisement) in the subject line of e-mail. But since spam is a universal nuisance, the FTC would have no control over spammers operating outside the U.S. The U.S. Congress too is seized of the problem.

There are six major Bills, three in the Senate and three in the House, for controlling spam. Of these Bills the most comprehensive is CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non- Solicited Pornography and Marketing), which was unanimously approved by the Senate Commerce Committee. The Bill requires marketing e-mail senders to include advertising labels and genuine return addresses.

The e-mail message must give consumers the choice of opting out of future receivers' list of marketing messages. The Bill prohibits false subject heading and holds companies responsible for hiring spammers. Under the Bill's provision, the Federal Trade Commission will be asked to consider building a Do-Not-Spam Registry, similar to the Telemarketing Registry, where consumers could have their e-mail addresses removed from mailing lists.

Although the economic potential of the Internet is being vitiated by spam, which like SARS must be fought globally, nothing should be done to destroy the potential of serendipity and free speech that the e-mail medium offers.

The writers is a Professor of communication, Norwich University, Vermont.