Peter Griffin: Banish spam at almost any price

COMMENT

Microsoft's Bill Gates does a lot of public speaking, but he's never one for making bold, hype-inducing statements like rival Larry Ellison, whose prediction in the mid-nineties of the death of the PC is still recalled every time global PC shipment figures are released.

It was interesting then to hear Gates predict on Friday, at a talkfest in the Swiss mountains, a spam-free world by 2006.

"Two years from now, spam will be solved," he told a select group of World Economic Forum pointy heads. He didn't go quite as far as saying Microsoft had found the silver bullet to end our spam woes.

He preferred to call it the "magic solution".

Undoubtedly spam is one of the plagues of online society, which most of us, whether dialling up over our rattley 56kbps modems or riding on megabits of bandwidth, are now firmly part of.

By some estimates, more than 40 per cent of email flying around the world is spam. The network inefficiency it creates is monstrous as is the frustration millions of people experience doing their daily spam cull.

I for one would happily pay Bill a few bucks a month, or a premium on my next bundled Outlook purchase, to make spam go away.

But what he's proposing is pretty vague at this stage and frankly reeks of vapourware.

The death of spam, according to Microsoft, has three possible approaches.

One involves the sender of bulk email having to answer a question in a return message that only thinking, breathing humans can. This is not a new approach and has already proved moderately successful. But it is time-consuming for mass mailings, many of which are legitimate and generates twice as much network traffic.

Another approach apparently involves senders being forced to work through some sort of "computational puzzle" that would make mass-mailings expensive and therefore dissuade spammers from dumping millions of messages on to the web.

Bill's third suggestion is that mail senders be hit with a micropayment for mail sent that the receiver judges to be spam.

People could filter their email based on monetary risk. If email gets through that is deemed by the recipient to be spam, the sender is charged a fee. In theory, senders would have to be pretty sure of their messages being accepted before hitting send.

But this approach sounds complicated and full of fish hooks.

You see, classifying spam is a subjective process. I may well be entertained by reading badly written pleas for money from civil war survivors supposedly living in central African countries, but you may deem it unsolicited junk. An extreme example, but there are plenty of line-blurring ones. Imagine the litigation it would generate.

It also assumes you can track down the spammer to collect the bill. But a lot of these spam merchants are a law unto themselves.

Can you imagine the complexities of co-ordinating a global fee-collecting operation across the US, China, South Korea and Brazil, the four countries that, according to the Spamhaus Project , generate the most spam in the world?

Sophisticated spammers set up their own sendmail servers, obscuring their locations through masked domains and dodgy internet providers.

Even when they are tracked down, experience shows that e-crime authorities usually have better things to do, such as catching paedophiles peddling porn.

There's another approach gaining support in the US. Target the advertisers who are the subject of the spam emails and who pay the spammers to leech their bulk mailing lists. There has to be a factory somewhere churning out the pills that do the magical enlarging. The "adult entertainment" company putting together the porn mags and vids must have a studio somewhere, even if it is in someone's back bedroom.

Why not target those companies, using legislation such as America's Can-Spam Act, to fine the chequebook wielders and put them out of business? A few dawn raids on distribution houses in the US would show the spammers who is boss.

Still, with the lengths spammers are going to just to avoid email filtering software it's a wonder the advertisers are paying up at all.

Even the most gullible members of the internet community have to be thinking twice these days as they scan their inboxes.

Are you likely to buy "Genierc Viagrand Sepur Viarga" from a company sending through such gibberish? Is anyone really going to place an order with the "Most trsuted onilne source!"

Either those people do exist or there's a huge conspiracy among the world's telcos to generate excess traffic in the form of spam email so they can flog more bandwidth.

Meanwhile, until Bill's engineers produce their magic solution, spam is best intercepted at the internet provider level where filters are constantly being retrained to detect new spam patterns.

Guard your email address like it's your credit card number and subscribe to some decent spam filtering service and you shouldn't be overly troubled by spam.

TelstraClear's internet arms Paradise and Clearnet as well as Xtra are already cutting back on spam with Brightmail's filtering software on their servers.

But inevitably, filters will create "false positives" - the deletion of legitimate email.

As one spam expert put it recently: "You're worried about missing an email from a high school friend who has not been in touch for 20 years."

Well, maybe that old school pal will just have to track you down the old fashioned way.