Chris Barton: A slice of internet lowlife before the one-finger salute

Who are these people? Berry Michaud, Mata Swensen, Doreen A. Fields, Daphne Joyce, Alfredo Sandaval, Lucien Layva, Vernon Daugherty and my personal favourite, Jesus Sims. They are just a small sample of the thousands who correspond with me by email every month.

The odd thing is that while the messages they send stay the same, the names ingeniously change. Vanessa Mckenna, Gustavo Christopher, Irvin Quick, Alenjandro Dye, Lawrence Eubanks. Stanilaus Eut, Ninon Osky. It never stops. Mostly I have no truck with them, pay them no heed, dismiss their protestations with nary a read and consign them to oblivion. I give them the one-finger salute - a curt tap of the delete key.

That is with the exception of once a year when 100 of them get their 15 minutes of fame. Yes, it's time for my annual spam sampling.

In a certain week every year I select 100 consecutive spam mails and read them - a subjective forensic analysis for trends and oddities. I also carry a vague notion that the process will say something significant about the human race.

The good news this year is that my spam is no longer growing exponentially. My inbox takes just over two days to fill with 100 spams - about the same time (two-and-a-half days) it took last year.

There has also been a big drop in the number of exhortations to buy pharmaceuticals online - totalling 34 per cent this year. The bulk of them are for male potency drugs Viagra and Cialis and others such as Valium, Ambien and Vicodin. Last year it was a staggering 58 per cent.

Penis-enhancement offers deflated too - from 11 per cent to 6 per cent. Cheap loans ("You can get a loan of $500,000 with a small monthly payment. Approval procedure will only take less than 2 minutes" ) were the big new entrant at 10 per cent. Offers of cheap women ("4 wives looking for fun have been matched for you in your area") were new too, on 4 per cent. Oddly, there's also a surge in cheap Rolexes, 7 per cent. Porn was on a par with previous years at 5 per cent and the rest was the usual smattering of work-at-home rip-offs, get-rich-quick schemes, dubious share and software offers, scams and oddities such as satellite radios.

The most surprising new entrant, however, was the unreadable/nothing category - spam that couldn't be read or was an empty email - at 19 per cent.

Some of that can be put down to the ancient Notes mail software we use at the Herald that has some features for web-address viewing turned off by our IT department.

But it's also because some spammers are careless and send out ill-constructed messages.

You could argue my 100 spams provide an archaeological slice of the lowlife - things we know about but don't really want to acknowledge, let alone have thrust in our inbox on a daily basis.

But in reality spam is just a pile of junk and a huge waste of time, band-width and computers. Spammers I've spoken to disagree. They say spam is the cost and consequence of connecting to the net. Spammers see the net as a gigantic open channel to receive.

If you go online, you're saying, "whatever is out there, give it to me". To connect is to "opt in" and if you don't like what the net has to offer, don't connect.

It's an interesting libertarian perspective, but one that the Government clearly doesn't agree with as shown by the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill - "an important step in the war against spam", according to IT Minister David Cunliffe.

It will require senders of direct-marketing emails, text and instant messages to ensure recipients have deliberately "opted in" to receive the junk, not just because they connected to the net. All messages must also have a means to opt out.

Maximum penalties for New Zealand spammers who flout the law will be a $500,000 fine for organisations and $200,000 for individuals.

Good in theory, but as we all know from the experience of countries with long-standing anti-spam laws, it doesn't work.

Mountains of spam continue to come from places where the long arm of the law doesn't reach.

And while anti-spam filters help, it still gets through. Which leaves me little option but to continue to give the single-digit prod to Diego Waller, Lupe Childress, Marin Kaufmann, Wendell Marquita Sol Kckue, Major Fish and their ilk. Until next year.