Typhoid email
By Charles Miller, June 8, 2007

Last week I read in the news the story of the Georgia lawyer infected with tuberculosis who ignored medical advice and exposed a plane full of people to the disease. He is now in custody, the first such medical quarantine in the US since 1963.

This week marks a related anniversary. It was a century ago on June 15, 1907 that the “Journal of the American Medical Association” published the first article identifying “Typhoid Mary.”

For those of you not familiar with the story, Mary Mallon was an Irish immigrant who worked as a cook in New York City from 1900 to 1907. At the time, medical science did not understand the concept of “healthy carriers” or people who can carry a disease while not being sick themselves. Mary is suspected to have infected many people with typhoid fever; as many as 50 unconfirmed deaths resulted.

When Mary was eventually identified as the source of the disease, she was quarantined for a while then released on the condition that she never work as a cook again.

Mary vehemently rejected the idea that she was spreading a deadly disease. She adopted a false identity and returned to the kitchen. More people got sick, more people died.

The next time New York City public health authorities caught up with Mary, they arrested and confined her in quarantine for life. She lived until her death two decades later, exiled on a small island in the East River.

The question of how society deals with irresponsible individuals is still with us today, but what on earth does this have to do with computers, you ask?

The people responsible for sending out spam emails are not welcome in the internet community. Most of us would like to see these pariahs quarantined for life on some deserted island.

Any reputable Internet Service Provider would cancel your account if they caught you sending out millions of unsolicited junk emails. As these senders of spam have had their accounts canceled, they have resorted to some really unscrupulous methods for sending out their junk mail. The worst of these techniques is the “spam zombie.”

Briefly, a “spam zombie” is a virus-like program that infects your computer. Once infected, your computer receives instructions from headquarters then starts sending out millions of spam emails. Soon the spammers have thousands of zombie-infected computers sending out their spam on their behalf.

It is estimated that half of all unsolicited junk email now originates from such spam zombies, making it all but impossible to shut off spam at the source.

Here is where I see an analogy to Typhoid Mary. Three times in the last two years I have encountered owners of zombie-infected computers who, like Mary Mallon, refused to believe they had a problem.

In each case I explained to the user that their computer was infected with a program that was using their internet connection to send out hundreds of thousands of spam emails every day. The users either did not believe this, or if they did believe it, they did not want to go to the trouble and expense of removing the infection. It was easier for them to deny the problem and not deal with it.

Since I do not have the authority to throw anyone onto a small island without internet access, those irresponsible users are probably still sending out millions of spam emails.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ@SMAguru.com.