Spams kill the enjoyment of receiving e-mail

Spams kill the enjoyment of receiving e-mail

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): About two weeks ago, I received a chain e-mail
from somebody I knew. What a little nuisance. The file was not
very large, still it took some time to download. As I've never
believed in chain letters, I simply eliminated it.

For a moment, I thought of reminding the girl who'd sent it to
me that useless e-mail could be as annoying as a loud honk from a
car behind you when the traffic light ahead is still red. But I
didn't do it, with the hope that hers would be the only one to
enter my in-box.

It nonetheless taught me one thing. That is, we have to be
discreet in sharing our e-mail address with others. While on the
one hand e-mail provides us with a powerful means for keeping in
touch with a lot of friends and relatives, and, as my own
experience has shown, can help tremendously in our work, on the
other hand it exposes us to potential abuses as well. Chief among
the potential harm is what is more popularly known as spam --
promotion materials sent to us by marketing guys somewhere on the
planet.

I also got an e-mail from a regular reader of this column who
shared with me his feelings about BombMails. In his e-mail, he
called those who enjoyed bombarding other people with tons of
unsolicited e-mail "malicious, irresponsible and coward people".
Such Internet users use special programs to keep sending the same
e-mail to our mailboxes, and at times the operation won't stop
until our site is down. This friend, for instance, had received
100 e-mails from an anonymous sender.

And, just before I started writing this article, I had an e-
mail from a friend at Intel Corp. who informed me that some smart
guy out there had sent him 67 e-mails with 1.4 MB of data each.
Can you imagine how much time he was forced to spend waiting
until all that junk was downloaded into his mailbox?

Junk e-mail

What's the big deal about spams and junk e-mail? First, let us
agree that junk mail is different from junk e-mail. Today,
because I subscribe to many international publications, my name
and address are now found in many marketers' mailing lists.
However, when they send me promotional materials -- in the United
States these are usually sent by third-class mail, I have the
option to just throw them to the bin. I don't have to pay
anything for the junk mail that I receive. The cost of getting it
to my address is borne by the senders, not by me.

But, when I get a junk e-mail, I have to pay. While the e-mail
is being downloaded into my mailbox, the clock keeps ticking. The
pulse keeps accumulating, and so are my connect charges. Whether
or not I choose to read the junk mail, I have to pay. And, as our
the above-mentioned reader of this column said in his e-mail,
"our phone tariff and ISP charges are so dear," it even makes
receiving junk e-mail more painful.

The problem is that sending e-mail to multiple recipients at
the same time is so easy and hardly costs the sender anything. To
find the recipients addresses is equally easy. All they have to
do is send out a software agent that browses all existing Usenet
newsgroups for Internet addresses and copy whatever they find to
their mailing lists. What they then do is generate as much mail
as they wish and flood the Internet.

In a way this is similar to sending promotional materials to
people by fax machine. While the sender still has to pay for the
telephone service, the recipient has to pay for fax paper and
they may not wish to receive or print it in the first place. In
the United States, fax advertisements have been prohibited on
this ground.

Why do people send junk mail? First, there are those who want
to promote their products and services at a cost that is as close
to zero as possible.

Promotional e-mail such as this is called spam. Their senders
are called spammers. Besides spammers, there are those who may
hold grudges against someone and try to get back at them by
bombarding their mailboxes. Everything is done, mostly, with the
help of automated software.

What do they mostly advertise in spams? A wide range of
products and services, mostly of dubious character. Pornographic
materials, get-rich-schemes and MLMs are among the most common
things they advertise. Many spammers take advantage of the free
trial periods that certain ISPs offer, and after three or four
days of intensive spamming activities they may just abandon their
account. The ISP will then be left with the task of cleaning
their system of returned mail as well as tons of complaints from
other Internet users.

Precaution

As mentioned above, we should reduce the possibility of our e-
mail addresses being captured by spammers and other junk-mail
senders. If you really need to post your address on a newsgroup
because you want direct feedback, for instance, never put your e-
mail address on top. Put it toward the end of your posting, as
name-collecting people usually browse the upper part only. They
are usually too busy to read the entire posting to find just a
single name and address.

Also, when you type in your address, you can modify them in a
clear way. For instance, I could give you the following e-mail
address: zatni.at.tjp.com (beware, it's not the real one).
Another way you could disguise your e-mail address is by slightly
but obviously altering the domain name, such as in
zatni@nospamplease.tjp.com. Really interested people will
immediately understand what you mean, and will make the necessary
modification before copying the address to their address book.

If somehow they still manage to get your address and send you
spams, you can try requesting that they drop your name and
address from their mailing list. Usually this will not work
though, since they may have closed their account already or they
have used a fake return address. What you can do is forward a
copy of the spam to your ISP. If you're a member of hotmail.com,
for instance, you can forward it to abuse@hotmail.com. ISPs are
as concerned as you are about spams.

Is there a way we can trace the real address of the sender?
Well, at least we can try. You can download a file called
SPAMHATER.EXE from PC World's site www.pcworld.com/files. As the
name clearly indicates, this program will try to identify the
real sender and will let you take revenge by bombarding their
site with your own junk e-mail. I wouldn't recommend this though,
because, if we fight spams with spams, we would be putting
ourselves on the same lowly level as the spammers.

There is also another strong reason why you shouldn't fight
spams with spams. Your ISPs will not be happy if you use their
resources to send spams in the first place. At hotmail.com, for
example, the policy is stated clearly that if they catch you
sending spams using a Hotmail account they will close it
immediately.

Most e-mail services are intolerant of spams and spammers. The
iName site, where I got my cool e-mail address, also condemns
spams and will not allow anybody to send spams using an iName
account.

If you think the problem of spams is not serious, it is.
According to a report in PC World, August 1997, one of the bulk
e-mailers sent out one million e-mails per day. If you'd like to
read more about spams, just visit www.spam.abuse.net/spam/.