Looters and vandals in a city without police
By Charles Miller May 16, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Last week I recounted the history of how on May 3, 1978, Gary Thuerk used ARPANET to send out the first-ever spam email.

He was sternly reprimanded for this and for the next decade ARPANET continued to develop into the internet we know today and did so free of spam email.

Over the years as the online network developed, the public began to gain access to the system. It was bound to happen that, once the masses had access, not all online users would be responsible citizens.

The second major event in the history of spam email occurred in April 1994. Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel sent a message advertising legal services to more than 6,000 message boards then connected to the internet and thus to the hundreds of thousands of users who read those bulletin boards.

Their action caused an uproar in the online community which lasted for months. Canter and Siegel had their internet service cut off and they were widely chastised by other users who said the internet was a commercial-free zone.

Canter and Siegel claimed they earned $100,000 from 1,000 new clients contacted through the medium of spam, and that their expenses were essentially nothing.

Fifteen years earlier when Thuerk sent the first spam email, he was reprimanded and he stopped. This time when Canter and Siegel were warned, their in-your-face response was paraphrased as “Get used to it, because we’re going to do it again.”

Since the internet was then no longer entirely under government control, there was no longer any authority with the power to stop them. Soon enough Canter and Siegel were back on the internet with a company they formed called Cybersell and a book titled How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway. And there were others who, like looters and vandals in a city without police, went forth without fear.

Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) soon became ubiquitous on the net as spammers sent out hundreds of thousands of UBEs. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) soon found themselves having to spend money to add more servers and more bandwidth to their networks in order to accommodate the extra traffic.

ISPs have tried to shut down spammers and filter the spam out of their systems, but with little success. Many industry analysts now put the percentage of UBE on the net as greater than 90 percent of all email traffic. The vast increase in spam is attributed to the fact that so much is being successfully blocked by ISPs. Though counterintuitive, this is true.

A spammer who used to be able to send 100,000 Viagra ads in the hopes of getting one reply now finds most of them filtered out. Now he has to send out a million UBEs just to find that one sucker and keep his response rate the same.

Because it is almost as cheap to send a million emails as to send one, spammers do not even try to do targeted advertising. They will send 100 million UBEs to find perhaps 100 customers who want to see it. The other 99,999,900 recipients of that spam are just “collateral damage.”

By now it should be clear to everyone that we are dealing with an email system that is broken. A growing number of internet users are abandoning email altogether while others are asking what can be done.

Next week this column will address a number of practices we can all follow to minimize the problems and make our use of email a more pleasant experience.

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 FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.
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