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In the past couple of months, I've noticed what may become an effective technique in the War on Spam. It does involve some expense and inconvenience, but that's true of almost every worthwhile endeavor, from the American Revolution to economic survival during a Bush presidency.
Spam
is the vernacular term for unsolicited
commercial email.
It arrives by the megabyte. When I
checked my email yesterday morning, there were 47
messages.
Precisely two were from people I knew. One was an old college friend in Denver, and the other was a writer working on a story for the little magazine we publish here.
The others were the usual assortment, and many of them were duplicates: Viagra, credit cards, revolutionary new ways to create DVDs, relatives of recently deceased officers in the Nigerian Oil Ministry who needed my help in transferring fungible assets, and offers to refinance my real estate at P.O. Box 548.
While it is true that I have received mail there for 25 years, I still pay rent on that address every six months. You have to wonder about the business acumen of any company which proposes to lend you thousands of dollars with a post office box as the collateral, and if I had time, I might try getting the loan, then letting them foreclose while I kept the money.
Spam costs the U.S. economy billions of dollars every year. Exact numbers are hard to come by. There are estimates that 45 percent of all email is spam, but that seems low -- in my case, it seems closer to 95 percent.
It consumes bandwidth on the Internet's transmission system, and that slows transmission of desired information. Internet Service Providers have to store the stuff as it comes in, which costs money, and many providers analyze it to offer some protection to their customers, which also costs money.
Spam also costs time. When I log on with my relatively slow dial-up connection, I'm stuck waiting for their unwanted junk to download, which takes time that I could otherwise use productively. And then there's the time it takes to delete it, as well as the worry that some virus or Trojan horse will sneak in.
Plus, I'm sure that on occasion, while trying to cope with the deluge, I've inadvertently deleted real messages. And I also have to worry that my email address or domain will end up on some spammer list so that my email won't get through.
But it's foolish to respond to this junk and ask to be taken off the mailing list. All that does is inform the spammers that they've hit upon a valid email address, which they'll likely make available to other spammers.
From my perspective, those strangers who send unsolicited commercial messages are trespassers. They put unwanted stuff into my computer, thereby using my property without my permission. However, there's not much I can do about it, since it's nearly impossible to identify them.
That's one reason anti-spam legislation doesn't make much sense. By the time the authorities eliminate one spammer, hundreds of others will be in business. And if they're operating out of the Netherlands or the Cayman Islands, just what laws are relevant?
Further, the possible misuse of anti-spam legislation is scary. Just think of how a John Ashcroft Department of Justice might respond to a complaint from a right-thinker who accidentally received a Howard Dean solicitation.
Start adding all this up, and you start to wonder whether email has become so trashed by the genius of American commerce that it is now more trouble than it is worth.
The telephone, for instance, once enabled us to talk to people at a distance, and it was generally a convenience. Now we get recorded solicitations, so that we can't even swear at the human on the other end, and if you're making the call, you spend hours navigating voice-mail menus.
But as I mentioned at the start, I've noticed what may be a new spam-fighting technique. About half a dozen times this summer, I've received actual physical postal letters from people I know. And these are people who have email, because I've corresponded with them that way.
Further, when we had a problem with the billing on our TV satellite dish, I tried calling, then emailing, all to no avail. So I sent a letter, and the problem got fixed promptly. Ditto with a long-distance bill.
Stamps cost money, and it is more trouble to address an
envelope than to hit the reply
button.
But as email gets more cluttered, traditional snail mail is becoming a more effective way to communicate. In theory, it might be slower -- but remember that the tortoise beat the hare.
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