Spam Wars

We all know how frustrating Spam is, currently i am subjected to spam on the following mediums:

• E-Mail - In the order of 4500 per month
• Pop-ups, Pop-unders, Spyware and other malware. Thanks to the Mozilla Adblocker and its pop-up blocking this is not a big problem anymore either.
• Blog comments, luckily not by my own blog yet but soon it will no doubt since I recently enabled comment posting ability, about 3 a week currently on other blogs I host
• Referer log spams, 10 a week
• SMS Spam used to be a problem for me, but now thanks to TPS that is not a problem now anymore, but TPS is voluntary and if the UK didn't have strong laws protecting people this would still be a problem.
• Snail mail spam, less of a problem now than before since my new living arrangements has a old lady who goes through my post and only gives stuff to me that is addressed to me, but in previous places I used to get about 15 to 20 snail mail spam articles a week.
• Telemarketing calls on my mobile used to be a problem but also solved by TPS and I do not answer my land line so I won't know about that one.
• Instant Messaging spam on IRC and other IM systems, not a huge problem for me but others are feeling it badly.
• Direct abuse of Microsoft's pathetic Messenger service, this pretty much happens the moment you put a machine outside a firewall, thankfully you can disable this "service" and thankfully in XP SP2 it will be disabled by default.
• Physical annoyance by sales people, charity beggars and other such types, I have my "get the fuck out of my way" look down pretty well so they run circles around me now.

As far as e-mail spam goes I keep track of time spent checking email for spam using iScan. This year I checked 311 611 emails for spam and spent 13 700 seconds of system time to do so. Of the 311 611 emails I checked 41 470 of them were tagged as spam. Of the 12 Gb of email I processed this year 300 Mb was spam tagged. Those are large figures and I am running a pretty small system for only a handfull of people, I would hate to imagine the impact that spam has on large ISPs.

So given all of this it does not surprise me at all to read stories such as the one about a ongoing war between a blog hosting company in the Netherlands and a spamming outfit in the states, people threatening anthrax attacks on spammers and the various name-and-shame tactics that anti-spammers are deploying to make the lives of spammers hell. I can sympathize with them and understand their rage.

Our only hope will be legislation and strong legal prosecution, there is no clear way to protect us from a technological point of view from attacks on all these fronts, the protocols we use such as SMTP and HTTP are all too weak and easy to abuse from a meta data point of view. The current spam laws leaves much to be desired, the people who are heading up government initiatives are clueless on a level I never thought possible so the future is looking pretty bleak. It seems that anyone with a desire to remain freely contactable will have to suffer as a result.