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Posted December 12, 2003
ADDENDUM added December 18, 2003
There are few things more ample on the Internet than spam. Not the processed meat, of course, but the message inappropriately sent.
The word spam
gained its first currency as a USENET term, for messages posted to boards that did not pertain to the board's subject matter. But the meaning changed as email discussion groups became more common than USENET discussion, and then as advertising became more common than trolling or other inappropriate messaging. Now, everyone knows what spam is, and almost everyone hates it.
I'm in a minority on this issue. I don't think it a very big deal.
Sure, I get a lot of spam on two of my many email accounts. On my Yahoo Web-based mail account, the bulk of messages are spamvertisements. But Yahoo offers a simple Bulk Mail folder where the bulk of these get automatically placed, and I just empty the folder into the trash every time I log onto Yahoo, without ever reading them. Simple. Efficient. Hardly any time wasted.
The other account that gets spammed a lot is the email address provided by my ISP. I've entered this address on numerous e-commerce websites, so I get a lot of junk mail.
Lots of people want to sell me insurance. I'm not buying.
Lots of companies want to eye their bricabrac and candy and automobiles and what-have-you. I'm not interested.
Many people want to make parts of my anatomy bigger. (Oddly, none offer to make them smaller.) Aside from the natural and spontaneous changes in size of one particular body part, I'm not interested in any other changes in dimension. And as far as my breasts
are concerned, what size gains or increased definition that exercise might provide are all that interest me. A recent email promising me the cleavage you deserve
should have been for a dating service, not the medical treatment the message touted.
And then there's the porn. Lots of come-ons, lots of promises of things never seen before, lots of links offered by Tiffany
and Alicia
and other enticing (but probably fictitious) first names. But what is promised rarely seems all that interesting. And just for the record, no, I'm not interested in barnyard
scenes.
Now, many people get upset by all this. I just talked to my aunt, and she doesn't think people should be writing this stuff, much less sending it. But I just smile. And hit the Trash icon.
This icon, the Trash, is one of the great innovations bequeathed the world by Apple. The Macintosh displayed that icon on even its earliest GUI desktop operating systems, at bottom right. In particular programs, such as Outlook Express (Microsoft's very neat and tidy and free email client, a great tool for the Mac though not so great for the Windows box), it is in the upper menu. It was so easy to use in early Macs, and it remains easy to use today in my oldish but still speedy-enough-for-me G3. More importantly, it is easy to use in Outlook Express, and in Musashi, and in pretty much every email program I've ever played with. It's so easy, in fact, I wonder about all the complaints about spam. Do people really have trouble using Trash icons? Do they not know which mouse button to click?
Now, I know — it would be easier if all we ever got in life was precisely what we wanted, and nothing else. In such a world, we would never have to engage in sorting, filing, destroying, massaging, etc. All data would be provided to us with precision, perfectly matching our evolving desires.
Utopia! We do not live in such a dreamed-of state when we drive to work, watch TV, or talk to colleagues around the water cooler — or fend off neighbors at the local store. Much of what reaches our senses, and takes up our time, is stuff that we don't find all that interesting. And so we devise strategies for dealing with unwanted advertisements and coffee-cooler bores. We cultivate sophisticated manners. We engage in strategies to avoid the uninteresting conversationalists; and we position ourselves to gain better access to the fascinating sources of entertainment and information. It all takes time. It does take up some of our precious attention. It's something we have to live with.
And it is not something we can control well, ahead of time. If everyone were to cull unwanted data before it hit them, they would learn almost nothing. And those people who are most successful at suppressing unwanted data? There's a word for them. They are called bigots.
The bulk of the complaints about spam are merely complaints about reality, a reality that is quite obvious in this new arena, the Web, but which we've learned not to see that much in everyday life. Most of the views and information that are directed towards us are not worth spending much time on. In the real world we tune out advertisements and propaganda and sheer nonsense everywhere. Preachers and zealots and demogogues and pundits and suitors and bores and nags and a myriad other persons, places and things demand our attention, and daily we slough them off. Why should we expect the Internet to be any different?
Because it's new, of course, and because we want this brave new utopia and we want it now.
Well, you aren't going to get it. You are going to get all sorts of things you don't like, and you are just going to have to deal with them. Responsibly, I hope, and with some cleverness, good manners, and aplomb, if you have any style at all.
Alas, taking things in stride is not highly respected any longer, and the style of magnanimity and tolerance is honored in the breach more often than the practice. I doubt if the most vociferous opponents of spam even think about not complaining, first.
Much of the demand to curb spam comes from people who have not even begun mastering their computers, people who seem ignorant of the basics.
What do they miss? The elementary tools at their fingertips, for one.
Most good email clients have excellent rule
or filter
features. In Outlook Express and Eudora and Musashi (to name just three of the many good programs out there) you can set up procedures so that messages from certain people, or directed to certain addresses, or having subject lines with certain character strings in them, can skip the Inbox and go straight to special folders (also called directories and mailboxes, in some programs and lingos). If one sets up the appropriate folders, then what's left in one's Inbox is spam and unexpected stuff. A quick look at the subject lines and the sender's names, and one can quickly tell what's the junk and what's interesting. A few clicks later and your Inbox is clean.
This is not hard. I do it several times a day. Do you complain about such things? Why? Do you also complain about having to wipe yourself while on the toilet? Some things are just necessary. Get over it.
Besides, it's nowhere near as bad as getting physical junk mail courtesy of the postal service. You don't have to pay to trash email, for starters. No physical trash can overflows, no detritus litters your lawn. When it comes to email, click, click, and it's gone.
Not all spam is bad. After all, some spam is even interesting! I probably learn something fascinating from spam at least once or twice per week. I mean, it's not as if advertisers have no function, and their solicitations irrevelevant to modern life.
Nowadays, somehow, most people equate spam with scams. But most spam is not scam. And of the spam that is scam, some of it is almost mesmerizing. The 419 frauds from Nigeria are scams, frauds of a strange sort. It takes a stretch of the mind to understand how anyone would fall for these transparently deceitful (if oddly riveting) messages, but some people, alas, do. And the spammers who scam these victims should be prosecuted — not because of any special Internet rules they've violated, but because the scammers engage in theft by outrageous deception.
Still, it is instructive to note one non-legal response to this criminal industry, the retaliatory art form the 419ers have spawned, spam-baiting.
Spam-baiting had an early history on USENET. The teergrube form, for example, is a
trap set to punish spammers who use an address harvester; a mail server deliberately set up to be really, really slow. To activate it, scatter addresses that look like users on the teergrube's host in places where the address harvester will be trolling (one popular way is to embed the fake address in a Usenet sig block next to a human-readable warning not to send mail to it). The address harvester will dutifully collect the address. When the spammer tries to mailbomb it, his mailer will get stuck.
Today's most interesting form of spam-baiting is not high-tech but sportive, and called scam-baiting. At 419 Eater and many other sites, netizens fight back the spammers, leading them on to ludicrous length, giving the con artists a taste of their own art. (My favorite example has one scam artist induced to send a picture of himself with a loaf of bread on his head.)
The chief lesson to learn from scam-baiters is that one should not play the part of the victim. Most of us do not have the time or the inclination to string along scam artists with a mirror-image of their own art, but we do have time to behave responsibly with our email client software. If you have not set up special folders and Inbox rules, thus making it easy for you to identify spam, then you really don't have much cause to complain.
There is also, of course, a great deal of software available for you to help deal with all the spam. I don't bother. Perhaps if I used a Windows box, I might, considering how unsecure Windows is. But since I'm a Mac user, I just put stuff in the trash and let the world go on its merry way.
Unfortunately, that attitude is hard to keep up. A friend recently signed on to Earthlink, and that ISP's spam fightin' methods made me run through a sign-in process just to return her email:
This email address is protected by EarthLink spamBlocker. Your email message has been redirected to asuspect emailfolder for [friend's email address elided]. In order for your message to be moved to this recipient's Inbox, he or she must add your email address to a list of allowed senders.
Click the link below to request that [friend's email address elided] add you to this list.
Now, having to go to a website so that I can reply to a friend's email is far more annoying than any spam I've ever received. After I negotiated that obnoxious hurdle, she replied:
Did I tell you I was getting 20 or 30 messages a day telling me how to make my penis bigger? Spam protection is the answer, my friend. (Since I haven't got a penis to start with.)
I advised her to put the addresses of her email recipients into her Earthlink spamBlocker program, to avoid the problem I encountered. I assume Earthlink allows that. (Otherwise it would be a cure far, far worse and more obnoxious than the disease.)
I became accustomed to destroying huge blocks of email messages long before the onslaught of spamvertising. I subscribe to nearly a dozen (sometimes more) email discussion groups, many of them sending scores of messages per day. I used to belong to more. I don't read all of the messages, you can be assured. I destroy the majority of them, reading only what interests me. So, in the context of an onslaught sought, the unsought emails I get from spammers seem almost, well, quaint.
In the spirit of tolerance and curiosity, I've also conducted a few experiments. My most recent experiment has proved most interesting. What kind of spam would I get, I wondered, if I signed up for an adult dating service
? I was not interested in the promoted services of the site (I didn't pay any money, and one rarely get any good dating leads from dating sites unless you pay some money, anyway; that's the way they are constructed). Funny thing is, I didn't get an appreciable increase in pornographic spam. What I got instead were my first-ever solicitations for Christian dating. Apparently, Christian spammers troll the adult sex websites looking for customers! (I've long suspected that the chief social function of modern churches is as a vast dating service and family support group — family values
includes the values and disciplines that can get one a family! — and I guess I really was right.) I suppose these spammers also think they are savings souls. How droll.
The idea that the government should bend over backwards trying to deal with all this strikes me as absurd. But then, nearly half of what Oregon Senator Ron Wyden takes up is absurd, so there you go. I suppose it might help to have various government agencies work together dealing with fraud, but many of the provisions of the Wyden bill go way overboard. Consumers and netizens don't need the government to save them, they need some common sense and a little perspective. The primary tools to help them deal with the perceived problem of spam are free. The secondary tools — spam software and the like, such as provided by, say Dignity Software — are worth trying out, but only after one has mastered basic things like one's Inbox and filters and Trash icon.*
And to people who complain about all the time taken up just waiting for an email to appear — colors and images and all — in their Outlook Express's browse window, well, I've a serious question:
Why do you have your program's preferences set to show images?
If one is on dial-up, one should definitely turn this off. The convenience of HTML and attached images in, say, Outlook Express is a dubious convenience at best. Besides, it only encourages a bad practice (see below).
And if you are using Windows, why are you using Outlook Express in the first place? The worst thing about this program, on the Windows OS platform, is that it allows worms and viruses to infect your computer. Switch programs! Or else get a Mac. (The Macintosh is nearly exempt from the hazards here, and Outlook is, for the Mac, mostly harmless.)
But no matter what platform you use, or whichever email client or Web-based system you subscribe to, please, please, please, don't include anything but ASCII characters in the emails you send. Don't use RTF, don't use HTML. The use of such technology should be limited, on the Internet, to the Web. When they are found in emails, they are indeed something to complain about. Yes, some of the chief culprits are spammers, but since I don't view images or HTML in email messages, I don't let their indiscretions bother me.
I do get a bit bothered when a friend (not a foe) sends me an email message that depends on HTML for its viewing. This, my friend, is wrong! Far more wrong than spam as such.
I came to this conclusion not from the admonitions of the ASCII Ribbon Campaign, but after a person sent me a bit of hate mail. He included a 3MB size image as a background, and it took my computer quite a long time to download and display it. I then saw his message: Are you drunk?
He disagreed with me, you see, about the interpretations of Jean-Pierre Rampal, flutist extraordinaire (but hopelessly enmired in the French style). Great. Hate mail — and it took ten minutes for my old, old Mac (this was some time ago) to load. Injury and insult!
Compared to that message, spammers seem mostly innocuous. Excepting, of course, the scammers, who deserve prosecution. Under existing law, you'd think, or under law as expertly tinkered with by the wizards who run Congress (wink wink).
The biggest waste that spam creates is all the time spent listening to people complain about it.
I feel myself in a smaller minority on the issue of spam than I do on most others, including politics, cosmology, and perhaps even aesthetics. So I can't help but second-guess the above rant.
So I asked a friend, recently — a friend who actually knows something about computers and the Net on a more technical level than I've mastered — about one recent trend in spam that I'd noticed. The issue weighed on my mind simply as a result of mulling over why I'm not bothered so much by spam, and everyone else seems to be. Here's what I wrote him (I'm the Trader
mentioned in the email, below):
> Do you know why mass mails frequently have these funny little words
> at the end of subject lines or beginning of emails? See the email
> below, which is precisely as it came to me. I find the wordyellowish
> unappealing. Even if I did want a bigger penis, having the email
> preceded by the word yellowish suggests that the bigger penis would
> be, well, yellow. Ish.
yellowish
Trader Want A Bigger Pen1s?
Want A Bigger Pen1s?
Gain Up to 3+ Full Inches In Length Increase Your Penis Width (Girth) By 20% Stop Premature Ejaculation! Produce Stronger, Rock Hard Erections A Larger, Harder Penis During Sex 100% Safe To Take, With NO Side Effects Fast Priority Shipping WorldWide Doctor Approved And Recommended No Pumps! No Surgery! No Exercises! 100% Money Back Guarantee
Now, my friend J o n K a l b ably responded, suggesting a likely scenario:
Although I do receive a lot of spam I almost never see the bodies of such messages so I have not noticed this, but I have noticed garbage at the end of subjects.
Allow me to speculate on why we see this with my own dramatic interpretation...
[Music.]
Announcer Fellow: Welcome to Dot Com theatre where we take you now to [drum roll] The Spam Front!
[Music fades in and out.]
Spammer: I'm going to inexpensively contact millions of users with my identical messages. [evil laugh]
Email Users: Yuck! Help us someone!
ISPs: We need to find a way to prevent these spam messages from clogging our email systems.
Spam Defender*: [fanfare] I am Spam Defender and I will help you. I notice that these messages all have the same subject line. That is their weakness and I will identify and purge messages when then match a known spam subject line.
Spammer: Very clever Spam Defender, but I will append a random set of characters to the end of the subject so that they won't match.
Spam Defender: Not good enough Spamming Slime. The body of your message is unchanged so I will look for body matches.
Spammer: Not so fast Spammer Defender, I will do the same with the body, appending random characters to foil your body-matching defenses.
Spam Defender: Your evil ploys will always have a weakness I can exploit, Malicious Marketer. My spam scoring system will identify messages with non-dictionary words as suspect.
Spammer: This defense is easily outwitted, Spam Defender. Instead of random characters, I will randomly select real words from the dictionary like,yellowish.
Spam Defender: Your attempts to breach my defenses are insufficient, Evil Emailer. I will just look for messages that begin the same as a known spam message and will ignore words appended to the end.
Spammer: You think that will save you? I will put my random words at the beginning of the message. [Laughs in triumph.]
[Music fades in and out.]
Announcer Fellow: This has been another exciting adventure in the ongoing war that is being waged inside your email box right now.
[Music.]
I know I make a big production out of everything...
I thought it was something like that. Unlike my friend, I do read a fair amount of my spam, which is why I was familiar with this element of modern spam, and he wasn't. I often find spam interesting, an artifact of our peculiar civilization. But not as entertaining as my friend's little drama.
This should not be taken to mean that I admire the bulk of the spammers, who are indeed pests. I would be ashamed to be a spammer.
Being a troll, however, is something else again!
By the way, last night I gathered messages for my most beleagured account. I received 117 spam messages, 96 discussion group messages, and two personal ones. Since the email program had pre-sorted the bulk of the messages into their respective folders, it took a half minute's quick visual scan to spy and select the personal messages, and another 15 seconds or so to delete the spam. I spent an hour responding to the personal and discussion group messages that interested me. Do you see, now, why spam doesn't bother me much?
* And this, alas, is something that most of the complainers have not done. Disclaimer: My conclusion here is based only on the complainers that I know. There are exceptions, I'm sure. Some professional anti-capitalists out there, such as Douglas Rushkoff, are quite adept with their computers. But if you ask me, they whine about spam because they just like to complain about how dang non-utopian this world of ours is. I'm skeptical of most of this ilk, and Rushkoff especially. (text)
* You might be thinking: why Spam Defender — he's warring against, not defending, spam! But, you see, Spam Defender
is the name of a shareware program that defends netizens against Spam. Do your own google search to find a link to it. It makes perfect sense. (text)
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