Ordinary Gweilo

Is spam (junk e-mail) really a big problem?

I have a Hotmail account which I almost never use. The main reason I stopped using it was that 99.9% of the messages were ‘spam’, to the tune of 20-30 per day. I briefly tried using Hotmail’s Junk Mail facility, but it limited the number of email addresses you could block and didn’t seem to work properly, so I gave up on it. I probably should just have given up on the Hotmail account, but I worry that someone might still use it, and it doesn’t take long to scan through the messages.

Suddenly a few weeks ago the amount of spam on this account dropped dramatically, and I now only get a handful of messages each day (all spam). What has Hotmail done? Will the spammers figure out how to circumvent their blocking?

My main email accounts receive a small amount of spam each day, but nothing excessive. I recently upgraded Norton Anti-Virus and Internet Security to the lastest version, and this includes an add-in for Outlook that puts virtually all spam into a special folder – where you can review and purge the messages, so a minor problem has become smaller.

Yet we keeping hearing what a big problem spam has become. This week the SCMP had a piece on the front page of the ‘City’ section saying that “Junk e-mail ‘costs $10bn a year’”. This is based upon a survey commissioned by the Hong Kong Anti-Spam Coalition that says that the average user spend 6.5 minutes per day on dealing with spam. Yeah, right. That’ll be on top of the 30 minutes reading and forwarding jokes and other non work-related emails, two hours surfing the Internet (and two hours updating their blogs).

Email is a marvellous time-waster in its own right, and even if you stopped spam and could prevent people sending jokes etc. through email, it would still be a problem. Email can be addictive, and often interrupts your other work and distracts you from what you are supposed to be doing. A former boss once sent an email to all the employees in Asia and requested a ‘read receipt’. He was amazed how many people had opened the email within a few minutes of it being sent. Some people even get indignant if you haven’t read the email they sent you a few minutes ago, as if you had nothing better to do than read emails.

Junk emails are a tiny irritation and represent only a small amount of the time that email wastes. Yet the Hong Kong Anti-Spam Coalition thinks that the government should regulate it. Are there any laws to prevent companies sending me junk mail through the ordinary post? I don’t think so.

Large companies can quite easily prevent most spam from appearing in the user’s Inbox. I can’t find the article, but a writer on the FT was commenting recently that he longer received spam (though he could visit it on another server if he wished). The reality is that most companies do very little to stop their staff abusing email and the Internet, let alone blocking spam, but the tools are available. When even Hotmail seem to have figured out how to block spam, it can’t be that difficult!

Incidentally, I do have a grudging admiration for the spammers, because they now work very hard to make the subject line grab your attention and appear to be legitimate. I received one (that I haven’t opened) telling me that my account is about to be deleted, and another one (which I did open) offering bargain flights. They have also hi-jacked another domain name I own, and use it to spend spam with a fake sender’s email address, though the only minor inconvenience this causes me is that I get a few messages from AOL telling me that the spam couldn’t be delivered.

I will finish with another quote from the Hong Kong Anti-Spam Coalition: “the finanical impact on the Hong Kong economy [is] also very remarkable”. If you say so.