The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
There are few things more annoying to computer users than checking email and having to sort through messages which are 90 per cent spam. Spam is the computer equivalent of junk mail; email you haven't asked for and which is delivered to you because a company blankets literally millions of email accounts in the hope that even a tiny fraction of them will respond. Marketing products using spam is the mass mail out taken to an entirely new level. Most spam is sent out by computers attempting to email random addresses. For example, they might start with dogs@hotmail.com, and then continue with every variant of that address: dogz, doggs, doggz, dogzz, etc. The computer doesn't know if the addresses are real or not, and it doesn't matter, because email are free to send anyway. AT&T WorldNet in the U.S. estimates that it rejects 10 to 12 million email every single day because the email addresses don't exist. Approximately 16 months ago, the U.S. government made a first attempt to tackle this problem. They passed a law banning email advertising unless a user had asked for an ad to be delivered to them. This explains why, if you read your spam carefully, it has a tiny line somewhere in it which states something like this: "you are receiving this message because you are a frequent visitor of our website, or have opted into receiving this newsletter. If you have received this mail-out in error, or wish to be removed from our list, please respond by sending an email to the address above." One of the worst mistakes you could ever make is actually sending an email to one of these companies asking to be taken off of their list. When you respond, what actually happens is that your email address is placed on a list of "live" addresses. It's like directly informing the company that your address is real and someone is checking the account. Spam is a huge and growing problem. Current estimates are that 40 to 60 percent of all Internet traffic is spam. It clogs up Internet bandwidth with useless material and has significant economic consequences. A recent survey found that Internet service providers spend millions of dollars to stop spammers, with about $2 of each subscriber's monthly bill going towards spam prevention. The U.S. government tried to ban it without success. They are now recommending instead that ISP's pay spammers to keep their subscribers off of their lists. In the European Union, they are trying the opposite approach. A law was introduced in the EU parliament last week making spamming a punishable crime with fines being unlimited depending on the number of messages that a company sends out. The only people currently happy with spam are companies selling anti-spam software. Antivirus companies like MacAfee and Norton were first onto the market, and sales of anti-spam software are rising faster than almost any other application currently on the market. Your options are simple: change email addresses often, never respond to spam when you receive it, buy a quality anti-spam program, or get used to the delete button in your email program. (cfisher@mts.net)
