“The bottom line is that spam is worse this year than it was last year, and it will be even worse a year from now than it is now. There will reach a point where spam will grow so intrusive, that drastic measures will have to be taken to protect productivity on the Internet.”Spam is a problem that affects almost everyone who uses the Internet. Desperate for a quick buck, cyber marketers use your email to pitch you on everything from penis enlargement to “get rich quick” schemes that sound suspiciously too good to be true. Yet the average Internet user is not powerless to reduce the effects of spam on his or her productivity online, and when the global Internet community is ready to act, there are techniques other than legislation that might be successful.

My freshman year of college around this time of year for Spring Break, I got together with a bunch of friends and headed out into the California wilderness for my first college camping experience. Just days before the trip I had looted the local “Big Five” sporting goods store, buying all those neat little camping gimmicks ranging from the travel size combination salt and pepper shaker to the camp store toaster. Yet of all the items I purchased, I was most proud of my brand new camp stove skillet, a rectangular metal tray that I planned to use in the creation of some yummy artery-stopping breakfast treats. Ah yes, just looking at the tray I could almost smell the sizzling bacon, the sausage, and that other mystery meat that had been a tradition at our camping trips for as long as I could remember – spam. You laugh! But there’s nothing like the taste of fresh spam in the morning, with the tall redwood trees all around and the fresh forest breeze in your hair. Ah yes, spam and camping go together like crotchless panties and girls named Devon!

THE BIG INCIDENT

The first morning of my trip I was eager to try my new skillet, so I raided the cooler for the bacon and sausage, then cracked open a fresh can of spam. A few of my new college buddies – pussies who hadn’t been camping with the rest of us back in the high school days – were a little hesitant when I sloshed that cube of goo-covered spam out of the can with a slush. I assured them they were going to love it. After loading up the skillet with all that it could hold, I cranked my Coleman stove onto its highest setting and then set off to prepare the toast. It was a freshman mistake that cost me both my skillet and my spam. See, at full blast it didn’t take long for all that breakfast meat to create a nasty pile of grease the likes of which haven’t been seen since the last time Bill Gates left his comb in a public restroom. The heat was so intense that it warped the skillet is no time at all, causing some of the grease to drip off the skillet and ignite on the flames. Before I could say “Smokey the Fucking Bear” I was staring at a raging grease fire which had no intention of burning out anytime soon. After combining our collective college-fortified knowledge, my friends and I managed to extinguish the flame, but my beloved can of spam was long gone.

That was probably the last time I ever mourned the loss of spam.

OUT OF CONTROL

Today, if I could make a raging grease fire out of all the spam sloshing through my bandwidth, I’d gladly crank that Coleman stove up to its highest setting. Everybody knows that the spam is getting out of control, but few know what to do about it. We simply tolerate it because there’s little else it seems we can do, and when you’re at your computer throughout the day, deleting spam as it arrives, the task is only mildly annoying. Yet try going on a week vacation… it’s a good bet you’ll spend that first day back deleting spam, with the offending messages numbering in the thousands. The time that you lose deleting some cockatron’s desperate, unsolicited and intrusive attempts to sell you his or her product or service is time you could have spent improving your own business. You have every right to be offended and annoyed when you receive spam emails. It’s a serious problem that degrades the usefulness of the Internet for all parties involved.

But you’re all aware of the spam problem. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Yet I am going to make a few bold suggestions as to how we might all take some steps towards reducing the amount of spam that enters our daily lives. I say bold because, no doubt, some engineer somewhere will have a list of reasons why none of my ideas could ever hope to work, but call me a hopeless romantic, I guess I just have to try.

JUST PUNCH UP DELETE

Odd as this may sound, if you’re against spam then don’t read spam, no matter how good the subject of the email might seem. We spend so much time telling anti-pornography advocates that if they don’t like adult programming to turn the channel, and that same advice applies to spam. Any time you read a spam email you are adding to the chances that you might actually do business with the person who sent it in the first place. If everyone simply ignored all of the spam that they received and deleted it immediately, sending spam would be a waste of the spammer’s time. Unfortunately, spam has a way of catching you off guard once in a while. Maybe you’re looking for some specific service that you’ve had no luck in finding on your own, then one day you get a spam message advertising that service. How can you ignore it? I admit I’ve slipped up myself on this front one or two times, so make it a personal policy to delete all spam emails before you read them. Usually they’re pretty damn easy to spot by the subject and sender email address alone.

JUST SAY NO TO BILL

Are you still using Microsoft Outlook? Shame on you! I too used Outlook not all that long ago, but pressure from my comrades here at the office finally convinced me to trade up. Outlook contributes greatly to the email virus proliferation problem – meaning more unsolicited emails we all have to delete when you Outlook users get infected – and Outlook’s filtering tools are less effective than those of superior email clients such as Eudora. No doubt somewhere there’s some Microsoft-loving Outlook user red in the face, smashing his fists on his desk while he reads this and screaming that I have no idea what I’m talking about. Get over it dude. Outlook sucks.

FILTER THAT EMAIL

Probably the most powerful tools for combating spam are email filters. Most respectable email clients will allow you to filter out emails with match a certain criteria – these messages can then be deleted or moved to a different folder without ever seeing your “in” box. The danger here is the chance that a good email will be mistaken for spam, but that happens rarely if you use your filters properly, and they can weed out at least fifty percent of the spam. Filters are especially effective at weeding out the repetitive, persistent spammers.

PEER PRESSURE

Don’t hesitate to slam anyone you know who is caught sending unsolicited emails as a marketing technique. Public shaming on message boards can be a useful tool for reducing the amount of spam that our own industry generates. When sending spam causes a business more harm through bad publicity than good through increased sales, the spam will reduce. Just make sure you know what you’re talking about before you start posting spam complaints against another company or individual.

“The bottom line is that spam is worse this year than it was last year, and it will be even worse a year from now than it is now. There will reach a point where spam will grow so intrusive, that drastic measures will have to be taken to protect productivity on the Internet.”

NEW TECHNOLOGY

The time is ripe for some new form of technology that will help Net users eliminate spam. This is the part where the engineers will tell me my plan has no chance of working, but I see a need for a “sender authentication system” where by each email user can allow or disallow the delivery of email based on the email address of the sender. Now this can probably be accomplished already through various software solutions, but what is really needed is a standard procedure that most Internet users employ when accepting email. It could work something like this:

I meet a new business contact at a convention and obtain his email address from his business card. I send him an email message indicating that I want to get together sometime and discuss business. His email client never delivers my email to the recipient, but instead send me an automatic reply indicating that I must first be validated in order to send email to that individual. It shows me an image file containing various drawn letters and numbers (similar to the authentication technique in use now by Alta Vista) and instructs me to reply to the email with the code as the subject. If the code checks out, the email client informs the person I’m trying to reach that I have passed the authentication procedure, shows him the original message, then offers to either block that user in the future, or add that user to the acceptable contacts list. Once I am authorized by the end user, I can send him emails freely at anytime in the future.

How, then, do you get around the problem of delivering the automatic emails that are sent when you visit a Web site and perform certain actions? For example, what if you visit a Web site and purchase a few DVDs for your movie collection… how can a Web site send you an automatic receipt documenting your purchase with the verification screen in place? Simple code that executes whenever you click a “Submit” form on a Web site that would cause an email to be sent to you. This code would pop up a dialogue box informing you that an automatic email will be created, and asking if you want to add that site to your acceptable email contacts list. If you click yes, your client is instructed to add that sender to the “OK” list (at which point it confirms with you that this request was actually made by you and not some malicious code) and you’re good to receive automatic emails from that Web site.

The bottom line is that spam is worse this year than it was last year, and it will be even worse a year from now than it is now. There will reach a point where spam will grow so intrusive, that drastic measures will have to be taken to protect productivity on the Internet. So if you don’t like the ideas I’ve come up with, I’d be happy to hear some of your own.

Connor Young is Editor-in-Chief of The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine.