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/.