BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, December 29, 2003
Why technology won't kill
spam. A remarkable thing happened when I downloaded my e-mail a
few moments ago. Forty-six messages flooded into Microsoft Entourage.
Three - all of them legitimate - stayed in my in box. The rest were
transferred to a folder labeled "Spam" before I could even look at
them.
I began paging through the spam
folder and found the usual foolishness. Come-ons for Viagra
substitutes. A get-rich-quick scheme from Nigeria. Pornography. And
lest you think that's a fairly light load of garbage, be advised that
this was only since 10 p.m. yesterday.
Yet I also found one message that
shouldn't have been there. It was an e-mail I had sent out last night
that for some reason bounced back. If I hadn't inspected my spam
message-by-message, I never would have seen it. And that's why -
despite an impressive error rate of just under 2.2 percent - I'm
going to remove the spam-filtering software I've been playing with
for the past week.
That's the problem with trying to
eliminate spam. Losing one good message is worse than having to sort
through scores of bad ones. The program I installed a little more
than a week ago - SpamSieve
- is highly rated, and it does seem to do an excellent job. But no
program is perfect, as the SpamSieve manual itself acknowledges: it
promises "to catch nearly every spam message yet produce very few
false positives."
Well, if there are any false
positives, or even the possibility of one, then I have to go through
my spam folder with exactly the same attentiveness as I did with my
inbox before I installed SpamSieve, don't I?
This isn't the software designer's
fault, of course. (And, in fact, it would work a little better if I
were more diligent: I keep getting warning messages that I've
programmed SpamSieve to be oversensitive by showing it too many bad
messages and not enough good ones.)
But the false-positive problem
shows the limits of technology, and demonstrates further why computer
users are dependent on Congress to deal with spam in an intelligent
way. Will a new law called CAN-SPAM - whose implementation is
described
in today's Boston Globe by Chris Gaither - make a
difference?
I hope so, but I'm skeptical. As
this recent piece
at Wired.com makes clear, CAN-SPAM may make so small a difference as
to be nearly worthless.
One of the best overviews is
this
article by Christopher
Caldwell that was published in the Weekly Standard last June.
Since spammers depend on sending out millions upon millions of
e-mails - a practice that now costs them virtually nothing - Caldwell
proposed taxing e-mails - a very un-Standard-like approach,
but one that might actually work. He wrote:
A penny-per-e-mail charge
would drive most spammers out of business, subject them to jail
time for tax evasion if they hid their operations, and cost the
average three-letter-a-day Internet user just ten bucks a year. If
even that seems too hard on the small user, then an exemption
could be made for up to 5,000 e-mails per annum.
Sounds good to me. In the meantime,
CAN-SPAM takes effect on New Year's Day. Perhaps when people see how
ineffective it is, they'll demand something more toothsome.
Caldwell's article would be a good place to start.
posted at 8:07 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
