Peter Griffin: So long, spammers, your reign is on the wane

It's too early to say what we all want to hear - that spam email, the unwanted refuse that clutters our inboxes, is dead. But it's definitely on the wane, the activity of spammers curtailed as internet users become less gullible and use better software to filter unwanted messages.

It could be that 2006 will be the year in which spammers throw in the towel, disillusioned at the dwindling response to their badly written adverts for everything from cut-price computer software to pornography.

Antivirus software maker Symantec estimates that two-thirds of all email sent in the world last January was spam. By June that had dipped to 53 per cent. For the first six months of last year, the overall figure was 61 per cent, up slightly on the first six months of 2004, but most email filtering companies expect spam levels to stabilise this year, which suggests that the worst is over.

America Online, for example, says the amount of spam reaching its users has dropped 75 per cent since late 2003.

If my experience is anything to go by, internet users are still receiving spam, but are confronted by it less often. That's because the email messages are being blocked by the gatekeeper, the internet provider - or diverted to spam folders once they get to the user's computer.

If you actually take the time to train your email filtering software, adding offending senders to a blacklist and friends to a white list, you'll end up dealing with very little of it.

We haven't yet seen the magic solution to spam, a technological answer that Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke of at an economic talkfest in the Swiss mountains two years ago.

But common sense is turning out to be a good solution, and internet users are catching on. By and large, spam has become surprisingly easy to pick out.

The hundreds of millions of users on free webmail services are also well served these days when it comes to spam filtering. Spam sent to Gmail accounts, for example, is very efficiently diverted to a spam folder. I've never had a false-positive result where legitimate mail is incorrectly classified as spam.

I have a POP 3 mail account that receives most of my spam, since it's associated with my own personal domain name, but Norton Internet Security detects most of it when it appears in Outlook Express. I've got a big anti-spam folder, but I rarely look in it, except to see what the latest fad is.

My Xtra account gets next to no spam these days thanks to ISP-level scanning.

My Hotmail account, once a collection point for spam and little else, is finally free of the blight, although one major offender - who goes by the name "Doctor" - still pops up from time to time.

The Doctor represents the Ultimate Online Pharmaceutical store which, despite its name, doesn't sell any drugs I want to take. A look around the web shows the drug-spam pusher to be prolific. If the US Government were to send a cruise missile into the headquarters of the Doctor, world spam levels would probably fall off considerably.

Instead, Governments have taken a more diplomatic approach, opting for anti-spam legislation such as the Can Spam Act in the United States.

While that has led to landmark lawsuits and raids on geeky teenagers in basements, spammers generally laugh in the face of the law, routing their spam via dodgy offshore internet providers to cover their tracks.

New Zealand's own spam legislation will probably be passed into law this year and while the sensible opt-in system designed to protect users against spammers has been applied, the proposed law is looking less relevant by the day. Common sense beats the law hands down.

Spammers have been forced to become cleverer. I'd never really considered blog spam until I started my own web log and began noticing strange comments left by people who thanked me for my interesting thoughts. They'd normally add a link to their own website, and sure enough they'd lead to a site peddling one product or other.

But this kind of spam may not be a big problem. The service I use, Google's Blogpsot.com, allows users to activate a system that requires comment-posters to enter a randomly generated password, which is something a spam robot can't do. Problem solved.

The same approach has significantly cut down on the proliferation of web mail accounts that exist for no other reason than to send spam. The word puzzles most webmail providers now employ are working.

But while we're worrying less about spam, the fact remains we're still receiving it. Around 80 per cent of the 556 billion messages received last year were spam, which translates into about 60 per cent or more of the average ISP's processed email traffic.

That's a great waste of computer servers and internet bandwidth, and does nothing to help to lower the cost of broadband, a particularly touchy subject in our neck of the woods.

Where spam is concerned, it has become a case of out of sight, out of mind for many internet users. Now spammers will hopefully realise the futility of their enterprise: the message simply isn't getting through.