A Short Essay on Spam

by Bill Adler

Spam is more that an annoyance. It's a plague. Our government has done almost nothing to combat spam. A few state laws and a tepid Federal Trade Commission crackdown of pyramid-scheme spam -- that's about all we've gotten.

Meanwhile, spammers are attacking our cell phones and other wireless devices with junk. Spammers are flooding our inboxes (and our kids' inboxes) with scams and pornography.

Spam accounts for between 50 percent of all email -- and is growing. The cost of all this junk email gets passed on to us in the form of higher ISP fees. Spam slows down the delivery of legitimate email. Spam causes people to lose, delete and miss real email. Travelers who retrieve their email at hotels have to pay costly per-minute charges because of junk email. And woe be to anyone who comes back from a week's vacation: Our inbox may be filled with dozens or hundreds of junk emails.

Spam is especially troublesome for people who are blind and have their computers read their email to them; it's also a big problem for people who are hearing impaired and rely on email, rather than the telephone, to communicate.  But spammers don't care.

9-11 showed how important email is during an emergency; and to the extent that spam makes it difficult for real email to go through, spam harms our national security.

It's time for Congress and the FTC to take strong measures against spam. If these kinds of get-rich-quick schemes, pump-and-dump stock scams, quack cures, and pornography were being touted through more "traditional" media, the government would have taken action a long time ago.

Meanwhile, for whatever good it may do, the Federal Trade Commission is collecting spam: Forward your junk email to uce@ftc.gov. Report spam to the sender's ISP by forwarding the junk email to abuse@isp.com, where isp.com is the sender's internet service provider (tos@aol.com in the case of America Online), along with all the message's headers. For more information on how to deal with spam, visit http://spam.abuse.net, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email at http://www.cauce.org/, or www.adlerbooks.com/submit.html.

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