Spam can be wonderful but it can also become nuisance

By Vishnu K. Mahmud

JAKARTA (JP): I am always happy to receive e-mail. Electronic mail is the fastest, cheapest and best way to communicate with my friends scattered all over the world. Whenever I open my e-mail account, I always hope to see new messages waiting for me in the in-box. And I usually do. But when I look closely at the topics ("Buy now!") and senders (Joe who?), I usually find spam.

According to dictionary.com, Spam is "a trademark used for a canned meat product consisting primarily of chopped pork pressed into a loaf". It also means "unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail". And most of us have been spammed before.

Why call it spam? It probably hearkens back to the irreverent British comedy troupe Monty Python. In one of their short skits, a couple is trying to order breakfast from a loutish waitress with a horde of Vikings sitting nearby. As most of the menu consists of Spam ("Spam, Spam fried eggs, Spam"), whenever the word is used it triggers the Vikings to chant the virtues of lovely Spam, wonderful Spam. Their boisterous singing eventually drowns out all conversation and sane thought!

The same can be said for Internet spam. Your in-box can be filled with e-mail you never asked for, from people you never heard of, for items you never wanted. And you will get a lot of them.

Although some consider spam an acceptable Internet advertising medium, many revile it. That is because you, the receiver, are actually paying for the ads. Consider this as you collect your e- mail from the Internet. After four minutes of downloading, you realize you have two e-mails from your friends and 15 e-mails from various parties wanting to sell you something. The Internet and phone charges are yours to settle. A 30-second download became four minutes because of the "ads".

Chain letters are another form of spam. How many of you have ever received the e-mail that Ericsson, the Swedish mobile phone company, is giving away free cell phones? By forwarding this to 20 of your friends, you too can obtain a new R320 WAP phone from Ericsson. The e-mail originated from Anna Swelund, Executive Promotion Manager.

Needless to say no one by that name exists and Ericsson posted a denial on its website. Nevertheless, I have seen this e- mail three times in seven months. There's always some poor fool out there who believes. And that one fool is enough to keep the chain rolling.

Make no mistake, spamming is big business. It is an efficient and cheap way to broadcast your products to the masses. Around the world, 24 hours a day. It is also indiscriminate. You may be targeting your fur products to members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who may react rather poorly to your new clothing line. But again, a small percentage of the millions of spam victims find the ads interesting and so they buy. That is good enough for the spammers to keep on trying!

How did your e-mail address even get on the spammers list? Have you ever posted your e-mail address on the Web? Joined a Usenet discussion board? Purchased something on the Internet? Forwarded a joke from someone to your circle of friends? Spammers can harvest a long list from various sources. Web stores can sell their client lists to marketing companies for a hefty sum, but most don't. Check the e-tailer's privacy policy to be sure.

There are many ways to tackle this annoyance. One way is to filter out the e-mail at your computer using your e-mail application. This way, all spam can go straight to the trash or to a separate folder. You still have to download all the mail from the server though.

Another way is to filter out the spam manually on the Web. Yahoo and other Web-based e-mail providers have special spam filters that trap suspected mail in a separate area. You can then just select which mail you don't want deleted, and download only the ones you want.

You can also use programs like JBMail (available at www.download.com) to weed out the spam via your POP 3 account. You first connect to your mail server, check out the sender, topic and file size and delete the suspected spam on the spot without downloading them first.

What you should never do is reply to spam. If there is a link or note on the e-mail saying "E-mail this address to take you off the list", don't even bother. It usually tells the spammer that your e-mail address is "good" and that their "message" is getting across, so they will spam you some more!

If you wish to put a stop to a particular spammer, try and track down who the person is and what service provider they use. You can do so by looking at the full message headers, not the "From" address, which can be counterfeit. Internet service providers despise spammers because 200,000 e-mails a minute use a lot of bandwidth. ISP's and other services must deal with this expense that the spammer usually does not pay for (especially if he uses a free web-based e-mail service like Hotmail for his business).

I personally don't consider spam an annoyance as I usually weed out my in-box hourly anyway. We can all survive using the tips I mentioned and ignore the spammer's intentions. Consider this, we have it lucky compared to the poor couple sitting next to a dozen heavily armed Vikings singing the virtues of a canned meat product. Who's going to tell them that they sing flat?

For more information on the battle against spam check out http://spam.abuse.net/spam/. To read and listen to the famous Spam Skit by Monty Python, click on http://www.detritus.org/spam/skit.html. Better yet, buy the video!

The author can be contacted at vmahmud@yahoo.com. No spam, please. I'm a vegetarian.