by Nariko Yamata

Created on: January 20, 2007   Last Updated: May 13, 2007

I own five domain names, so I get a lot of spam. I also get a lot of
spoofs. These are people who hijack my domain names with robots in order
to send you spam. I deleted six-hundred and ninety one spoofs once after
an attack. I've since been able to fix the leak, so the number is vastly
reduced.

Why do companies and individuals send spam?

I'm just not sure. Maybe some me-tard out there is actually buying Viagra

from a message he received via a spam email, who knows. Spam must
generate results and some group of corporate pigs must be getting rich off
of it, or it would not exist. Currently, nine out of ten emails sent
worldwide are spam. The numbers are mind boggling.

You don't need to be an information technology professional to know that
everyone who owns a computer and/or works for a living is at risk. Spam
is the source of most viruses, worms, and Trojans that crash your computer
or your company's. Right now, spam is clogging your personal and work
email-taking up more space than email sent by people who you actually
desire correspondence with.

The so-called answer is to slap on a spam filter, software that supposedly
separates the wheat from the chaff, throwing "good" email into one folder
and "bad" email into a designated folder creatively entitled "SPAM".
Sure, it looks great on paper, until you deal with the dreaded phenomenon
of false positives. In an ideal world, spam emails would be easily
segregated from non-garbage emails, but computers don't work like that.
So it is likely that an email from a friend or a client ends up in the
SPAM folder. The consequences of a false positive can range from your
mother or friend being pissed off to a lost half a million dollar account
at work. Obviously, the wiser you are, the more likely it is that you
will look through your SPAM folder before deleting all the emails. One
popular email service, Hotmail, has a SPAM folder feature with an eighteen
percent error margin for false positives. This is the worst among all the
email services, including Gmail and Comcast. This means that if you have
a Hotmail account with a SPAM folder, eighteen out of every hundred emails
identified as SPAM you're getting are actually real emails being
accidentally deleted.

Oops.

Here's the problem: If we outlaw spam in America, then spammers will route
their email through servers in other countries, like Russia or China.
Spam is a worldwide problem. Making anti-spam laws here in the United
States won't fix anything.

The only possible strategy in my mind is to offer incentives to those who
would take vigilante justice on spammers. In other words, I think the
only solution is to offer prizes, such as Nintendo Wiis, to talented
hackers. You know, like an X-Box console or a new modded-out PC, or if
all else fails, cold hard cash. Basically, the object would be to create
a Cold War against spam. The objective: to hack into spammers' computers
and make them regret having ever pushed (or programmed, as it were) the
Send button.

Until we wake up and realize that spammers need to be ferreted out and
dealt with in a strategic manner, spam will continue to flourish as it has
since the age of email began.

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