Wednesday 26 May 2004

Pic of the day: With the nifty superpower "Siphon Speed", players in City of Heroes can get superspeed for a time, while slowing the villains to a crawl. Now if only we could do the same to spammers.

Spam

I was planning to report on this topic today, so it is only a mild surprise to find that I have written about it one year ago to the day. (My subconscious likes to pull these tricks on me sometimes.)

Let it then be recorded for posterity, that in the year of the Lord 2004, virus and commercial spam made up 99% of my inbound mail. Yes, it is true: On an average day I received perhaps one mail from a friend, and 80 to 120 unwanted mails from strangers.

Now you can say that this is no more than I deserve when I leave my real e-mail address on every web page, well over 1000 of them all together, as well as on newgroups and online forums. Well, it does create an opportunity. But that does not mean I invite it, any more than a drunk girl invites a rape. Those who think along these lines will, I firmly believe, be more useful to society if killed and made into dog food. Dogs do have some positive value to some people.

***

With that out of the way, let us agree that something is seriously wrong. Last year, half of the world's e-mail was spam. This year, it has passed 60% and will likely reach 70% during the year. We are facing the actual reality that wanted mail is accidentally deleted, not once in a while but fairly regularly, by people or programs trying to delete spam. If the trend continues, legitimate use of e-mail may start to diminish, as people no longer find it reliable enough and convenient enough.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on what they replace it with. I think it will be hard to go back to older forms of communication. Instead, I expect a rise in the use of instant messaging, in which there are already provisions in place to keep your contacts separate from random strangers. If people want to send me a message on ICQ, for instance, they cannot just butt in. They have to get an OK from me first. Once they have that, they can send me messages even when I am offline. This sounds like a good contender to e-mail. Perhaps there will be some sort of unified messaging system with this feature.

Another possibility is that traditional e-mail evolves to include strong anti-spam measures. The strongest of these would be a white-list (as opposed to blacklist), like with the messaging channels. Before someone can actually mail you, they need to be registered as a mailing partner. Some people have such systems already, and I can see them being useful. But not to me, since I want any stranger to be able to mail me about my journal, if they have any questions and comments. It is probably not appropriate for business either.

One measure that seems likely to be adopted is a server-generated tag that certifies which mail server the message comes from. If this does not match the domain in the "from" field, this is a pretty strong hint that the headers are faked and thus that we have a virus or spam on our hand. This measure alone would probably eliminate 90% of the trash in my inbox, and greatly extend the time that e-mail is a viable form of communication.

Another possibility is to make sender pay for e-mail, just like you do for paper mail, only a much smaller sum. For practical purposes, payment would normally happen at ISP level: Each ISP would have an account with every other ISP. Failing that, smaller ISPs would be part of a group or union with a common account. As long as you receive about as much mail as you send (which is the normal in legitimate correspondence) there would be no worry. But if you host a bunch of spammers, you would have a net outflow of cash proportionate to the spamming. This would strongly motivate the ISPs to find their spammers and root them out as early as possible. And it would also help pay a compensation to those ISPs who are on the receiving end. The downside is there is bound to be some administrative overhead. And users infected with spamming viruses might get billed some large amount before they realize what has happened to them.

The problem with these large-scale approaches is that they require everyone, or pretty much everyone, to join in. With all of the developed world and then some already connected, this will not be easy to achieve. Until then, various companies will continue to make money from anti-spam software. Whether I am going to be one of their customers, I have not yet decided. Actually, having this much traffic makes it simpler in some ways: I can easily spot a pattern in the spam, as there will be several mails with exactly the same size for instance. Mail from friends won't be the same size as everyone else. Things like that.

Even so, if you want to mail me, it is probably a good idea to not use a very common heading like "hi", "question" or "your document"... I still read all the spam marked "I love you" though. ^_^