Aggravating, time consuming, and expensive — spam, cyberspeak for junk mail — has gotten so bad that many computers are virtually unusable.
| Tell me about it. I was so busy for two days last week that I didn't have time to read my mail. I had over 900 messages, of which most were spam. Anybody whose mail I didn't answer, I apologize... |
"This is totally illegal and something needs to be done about it," said Peter Chambers of Affinity Web Services.
| Actually, sending email is a legal activity in most places. It's hijacking other people's computers to use as SMTP servers that's illegal... |
Last year, President Bush signed a law making spam illegal in some cases. The Bush administration has declined to create a national "do not spam" registry to discourage unwanted e-mails, arguing that using the current technology could allow such a registry to be hacked, giving the unscrupulous spammers access to the e-mail addresses on the list. Spam costs U.S. businesses $4 billion a year in lost productivity alone. Consumers can buy spam blockers for about $50 but larger businesses and Web service providers are spending $1 million or more on software to block certain headers or words in incoming e-mails.
| Spam blockers aren't infallible, either. I have tales of woe on that one, too... |
While spammers defend their right to send unwanted e-mail, experts say many of the messages carry viruses, trick consumers into buying useless products at inflated prices and lure consumers into authenticating their addresses and giving up their personal information.
| Pay Pal and EBay phishing seems to be down this week. I wonder if those guys were caught? |
Tech giants Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo and Earthlink are developing "Sender ID," which identifies and deletes any e-mail that can’t be traced to its Internet address. It is similar to caller ID for telephones.
| That's a damned good idea. I've got telstra.com and bigpond.com blocked at the server, and I've come close to doing the same with AO-Hell a few times. Instead, this afternoon, instead of working on Rantburg — I should have the new server installed this week — I'll be working on a spam killer that I started a couple months ago. |
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