When I was driving once I saw this written on a bridge:They Might Be Giants, from the song “Ana Ng”
I don’t want the world, I just want your half.
Dear Vorticians,
It is entirely appropriate to quote the band They Might Be Giants, known for its elliptical, cryptic and tongue-twisting lyrics, in a week when the Oxford Dictionary of English has added such new words and phrases as “muggle,” “bootylicious” and “bada bing.” (Maybe the French word police are right after all.)
In case you haven’t been hipped to these words, a muggle – in the world of wizard Harry Potter – is someone lacking magical powers, and bada bing (with its full version bada bing, bada boom) is “an exclamation to emphasize that something will happen effortlessly and predictably.” It’s also the name of a ‘gentleman’s club’ in the HBO series “The Sopranos.” (Gentleman’s club has always struck me as oxymoronic.) You’ll have to look up bootylicious on your own.
No doubt – although I have no copy on hand to verify this – the word spam made it into the Oxford in an earlier edition, both in reference to the spiced meat variety of the word and its connotation as unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). I’ll refer to it as UCE or sp*m throughout this note because some filters knocked out a previous newsletter that made copious reference to sp*m. (I’m told it was not so much the mention of sp*m, but the high number of occurrences of the word in the missive that piqued the heuristics or word weighting.)
I received lots of mail about the UCE problem, and I’ll share some below (you can send additional thoughts to jgallant@vortex.net any time). Many of you found the comments from UCE king Ronald Scelson as scary as I did and, in case you didn’t believe him when he said that legislation won’t come close to solving the problem, check this out. The head of the Federal Trade Commission, Tim Muris, said in a speech this week that the eight or so pieces of proposed anti-sp*m legislation the new Congress will take up in September simply won’t do the job – adding that some could actually be harmful to consumers.
“In the end, legislation cannot do much to solve the sp*m problem, because it can only make a limited contribution to the crucial problems of anonymity and cost shifting,” Muris is quoted in an MSNBC article. “Unfortunately, the legislative debate seems to be veering off on the wrong track, exploring largely ineffective solutions.” (For the full article, go to https://www.msnbc.com/news/954523.asp )
Sounds encouraging, no?
It may be worse than you think. In a special edition focusing on the future of the tech, Business Week this week cited UCE as one of a handful of problems that could undermine the resurgence of our industry, along with security threats, piracy and the slower-than-hoped-for rollout of broadband.
“The onus is on techdom,” writes Stephen Baker. “It’s not just a matter of building better software to block sp*m. Tech companies must also lead the debate, helping steer Congress and the public along a path that will protect e-mail and keep e-commerce safe – without sacrificing the efficiency of one of the industry’s treasures, electronic mail.”
That really rings true in a week where many of your mailboxes were no doubt filled with e-mail generated by a new version of a very pesky old virus.
What to do? Here’s what some of your fellow Vorticians think about the UCE threat.
Vortician Martin Carr wrote: “John, I think this whole sp*m issue is being made way too complicated. We have tools that work today to block unwanted senders or subjects. The problem is the mega-sp*mmers are allowed to use whatever source address or subject they want, so we can’t block them permanently. We should keep the solution simple.
“Have a registered address only for sp*mmers. The government could create a registry for mass sp*mmers to obtain a licensed address to use for all sp*m. Also, they could create standard text required for use in the subject of all sp*m sent. Something like ‘Advertisement’ would be clearly stated at the beginning of the subject. Additionally, and more politically difficult, the government must require all ISPs to filter out all sent packets that are not using the ISP’s authorized IP address. This is needed to clamp down on spoofing by sp*mmers and hackers.
“Of course, severe penalties should be applied to all violators (sp*mmers and ISPs) based on the number of e-mails sent illegally. Existing fraud laws could also be brought into play against people misrepresenting themselves by using fraudulent addresses and subject lines. This would allow us all to stop sp*m more effectively.
“Maybe I’m missing something, but it appears we are focusing way too much on a technology solution to a social problem.”
Vortician Rick Aspan said: “The only way to stop sp*mmers is to stop the flow of what they’re after: money. And the only way to do that is for people to stop buying what they are selling. Period. This is more of a people problem than a technology problem.”
Vortician Dave Roberts offered this tip: “I fight the sp*m problem all day long. After more than a decade of using my same personal e-mail address with my own domain name, I receive literally hundreds of messages a day, over 80% of them being sp*m. The only thing I have found that really works is a little gem of a program called PopFile. It’s open source and can be had for free from http://popfile.sourceforge.net. Interestingly, it’s written in Perl and is multi-platform as a result. I use it on Windows with great success.
“The nice thing about it, versus a server version, is that it allows individual tuning of what you consider sp*m versus non-sp*m. For instance, if you subscribe to industry mailing lists, you can teach PopFile to recognize those and let them pass, unmolested.”
Vortician Ralph Baumgartner added: “John, personally, I don’t know what to do, since I’ve found that sp*m filters can be as much of a problem as a help. The problem is that I receive a ton of technical e-mails everyday during the week, and some on the weekends. Some of them deal with the very things that I might want to block from sp*m e-mails.
“For example, I get a ton of mail about cellular phone service. What do I block – phone? Some of my e-mail is about phone service regulation. If I blocked, then I would not have been able to get the ones I wanted.
“I either have to miss e-mails I need and want, or send all suspect e-mails to a folder and go through them to find the ones I need, which is pretty much the same as getting them in my regular e-mail folder.
I wish I had an answer.”
So do I. So do I.
That’s it for this week. Thanks. Comments to jgallant@vortex.net.
