Spam is evil

For most people who use email there is no question that spam is an annoyance. Depending on how long you've had your address and how careful you've been (and how good your provider is at filtering), this can vary between minor irritant and rendering your inbox useless.

I'd argue, though, that it's worse than an annoyance: spam is evil. It is evil for a lot of reasons, but here are the ones I consider most significant:
 * Spammers use theft as a core part of their business model. They use other people's resources, without their permission, and without payment.  This weakens legitimate businesses.  It's theft, plain and simple.  Most spam is not delivered from servers owned or paid for by the spammer, the bulk of it goes out via s - vast networks of compromised computers.  And of course along with the spam, who knows what else you might be getting from a computer that is already infected?
 * Spammers cost every internet user money. Somewhere around 95% of all the world's email traffic is spam, carrying, filtering and forwarding that spam is costing business - and that means us - up to $200bn in 2009 - that's only 10% of the cost of bailing out the banks but it's still a lot of money, and it's happening every year not just this year.
 * Spammers sell counterfeit and stolen goods. What makes you think that watch manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, software firms and the like would offer their product at discounts of up to 80% off their own channel?  No reputable company would do this, they could not afford to.  The spammer might tell some tall tale about grey markets but it's much more likely that the product on offer comes from a sweatshop run by an organised crime gang in China or the third world.
 * Spammers cost every company that does business online a lot of money. As a former email administrator more than two thirds of the cost of my mail infrastructure spend was systems an software to filter out spam.  On some days over 99% of messages received or targeted at our servers were spam, and even now with the domains no longer being advertised our spam filters are dropping an average of around a million spam messages a day.
 * Spammers make money out of the weak and vulnerable. Smart people don't reply to spam, don't click on links in spam emails, don't display images in unsolicited email, don't execute code sent by email.  The people who buy form spammers are the weak, the unsophisticated, and often the desperate.  Spammers track social issues like leeches track a wounded animal.  Alongside hardy perennials like fake watches and Viagra we now have credit deals, remortgaging, financial bail-outs.
 * Spam and are inseperable.  Organised crime gangs are involved in the production and distribution of the email lists, the harvesting of personal data, the production of conterfeit goods, the "" services that spammers use, the list is endless.  Even if the company that sends you the unsolicited email is more or less legitimate, the mere fact of them sending you spam means that they have almost certainly, knowingly or unknowingly, funded organised crime.

Here's an example: Laura Betterly, an unrepentant spammer, says it costs her $250 to send half a million messages, but most of the cost of transporting, storing, processing, filtering and discarding those messages is paid by the recipients, not by her. Imagine if every junk mailing came postage collect with no option of declining delivery. Imagine if every telephone cold-caller reversed the charges with no option to decline the call.

Her response rate is in the thousandths of one percent. For every half million messages she will get maybe ten buyers, and that's enough to pay for the negligible cost. And who gets the $250? Most spammers use botnets of s controlled by the or other organised crime gangs. These gangs are also the major traders in personal identity information, stolen credit card numbers and so on. So the few respondents are putting their personal details in the hands of some of the most unscrupulous people on the planet.

She gets 40% commission on each sale of (ironically) anti-spam software. This is roughly the margin you'd expect for a branded product in a mainstream consumer store, online sales are typically discounted. And what guarantee is there that antispam software from a spammer is going to work?

What to do about spam

 * Never reply to a spam or click a link in a spam email. If you click their "unsubscribe" link then you will be informing their systems that the address they have sent to is "live" - that substantially increases the value of that address in the lucrative market of email address resale.  In other words, clicking "unsubscribe" will have the exact opposite of the desired effect.
 * Never buy anything from an unsolicited email. Ever.  Even if it looks kosher.  Hell, even if it is kosher.  Simply never buy anything from an unsolicited email.
 * Practice safe email. Safe email means:
 * no inline images
 * no executable files
 * no html content
 * This is hard to do with some webmail providers, and less nice and whizzy, but you'll be thankful the first time you get a phishing email. Phishing is a core component of the flourishing business in identity theft, and the criminals who engage in phishing vary between the comically inept and the frighteningly sophisticated.  Few phishing emails, though, stand up to the test of being read in plain text.  The bogus domains stand out like a sore thumb.


 * Never give any personal information to anyone in response to an email request. See item 1, of course, but more than that: what are the chances that your bank would ask you to tell them the personal details you ave them when you opened the account?  However plausible the email might be (and I have yet to see one that did not have several grade school level spelling errors) this is not what banks do.  If you are in any doubt, look the source company up in the phone book and call them.