RickInOz

Please feel free to sing along with the Monty Python song.

As I’m sure you can guess, this posting is not about that iconic meat product, but rather the noxious disease of the internet. Recently it was the 30th anniversary of the first recorded spam message. An unsolicited message flooded round Arpanet, the modern internet’s predecessor, to much criticism. This year also marked the 15th anniversary of email spam. Today the vast majority of emails are spam messages.

For a while they became notorious for offering sordid products to improve one’s sex life, enlargement of various body parts and access to the depths of sleaze. Then the 419 scam mails started flooding into inboxes, seducing the greed of huge number of naive simpletons to sending their money to complete strangers for the promise of unexpected windfalls. Email is also used to spread viruses in “payloads”, namely attachments that appear to be benign but contain malware. These viruses often dredge the recipient’s email address book for more potential victims. The most benign form of spam is the chain letter. Messages encourage users to forward it on to friends with the premise of luck, prosperity and other unattainable promises, thus propagating the trail of spam.

At best spam is a nuisance, at worst it chokes and slows the entire world network. So preventing this blight is crucial. Much spam is filtered out at choke points on the internet backbone. More is filtered at the ISP level, but much makes it through to user inboxes by clever disguise mimicking genuine messages. As a result everyone who uses email has a responsibility to block spam too. For this reason most email clients now include facilities to quarantine undesired messages, thereby preventing both the user and others.

Unfortunately spam gets everywhere including web forums, online chat rooms and even blogs. As an example of how bad the problem is have a look at the top of the right-hand column and you will see how many spam comments this site has blocked . Spam is a problem, but we can all work together to stamp it out.