If there’s one thing that drives me completely insane in the modern world of computing it’s spam. It consumes my time, day after day, and devours the resources of our mail systems. In my own mailbox I get a few hundred spam messages a day, most of which I’ll never even see, let alone read. Thankfully most of these are filtered, but there’s still at least 20+ which I have to manually deal with every morning.
At work the mail systems for the Computer Science department are processing around 20,000 incoming email messages every day. A remakable 61% of these are spam, which is quite an increase from 49% a year ago. We run two mail hubs to process the incoming email which means we’ve effectively had to buy and run one server just for processing the spam email. I don’t even want to start on the amount of time spent dealing with spam messages that make it through to our helpdesk systems.
Ever noticed how spam email comes from rather an ecletic selection of email addresses? Has one of those addresses ever been yours? If there’s one type of email even more annoying that spam it’s bounces generated as a result of spam, sometimes thousands of them. You’ve suddenly become an unwilling victim of spam. Your address abused, and maybe even your name tarnished. What gives spammers the right to do this? At least SPF and similar technologies go some way to preventing this.
And as if spam email wasn’t enough we now see it creeping in to many other Internet based systems. How long until there’s a spam comment on this weblog? Or a stack of spam referrer entries in my apache logs (and consequently my statistics)? Or until I receive the next random message on one of my messenger services?
Whilst I’m ranting, another thing I can’t stand are those pages of junk links that appear when you try and google for something, particularly if it’s a fairly common term. Thankfully google is trying to deal with that, but it’ll be a neverending battle.
It seems in the non-Internet world we can easily regulate junk messages. We used to get a fair amount of sales telephone calls and general junk mail through the front door. Within weeks of registering with the Mail Preference Service and the Telephone Preference Service these have completely stopped. I’m not naive enough to believe this could be done with the Internet, but it helps put things in to perspective.
One of these days I’m going to get sick of the battle and just say “screw ’em all” and unplug my ADSL modem. After all, people keep telling me I should try reading more books.
