Tangled Up in Spam
…To find your real e-mail, you must wade through the torrent of fraud and obscenity known politely as ''unsolicited bulk e-mail'' and colloquially as spam. In a perverse tribute to the power of the online revolution, we are all suddenly getting the same mail.

The spam epidemic has just a few themes and variations: phone cards, cable descramblers, vacation prizes. Easy credit, easy weight loss, free vacations, free Girlz. Inkjet cartridges and black-market Viagra, get-rich-quick schemes and every possible form of pornography. The crush of these messages on the world's networks is now numbered in billions per day. One anti-spam service measured more than five million unique spam attacks in December, almost three times as many as a year earlier. The well is poisoned.

Spam is not just a nuisance. It absorbs bandwidth and overwhelms Internet service providers. Corporate tech staffs labor to deploy filtering technology to protect their networks. The cost is now widely estimated (though all such estimates are largely guesswork) at billions of dollars a year. The social costs are immeasurable: people fear participating in the collective life of the Internet, they withdraw or they learn to conceal their e-mail addresses, identifying themselves as user@domain.invalid or someone@nospam.com. The signal-to-noise ratio nears zero, and trust is destroyed.

''Spam has become the organized crime of the Internet,'' said Barry Shein, president of the World, one of the original Internet service providers. ''Most people see it as a private mailbox problem. But more and more it's becoming a systems and engineering and networking problem.'' He told the 2003 Spam Conference in Cambridge, Mass., last month that his service is sometimes pounded by the same spam from 200 computer systems simultaneously. ''It's depressing. It's more depressing than you think. Spammers are gaining control of the Internet.''

If your own experience doesn't seem this bad, just wait.…If five daily spams seem merely annoying, 20 or 30 will be maddening, creepy -- and chilling. Some avid Internet users report a hundred or more a day.

The harvesting of e-mail addresses by spammers is relentless and swift. Investigators for the Federal Trade Commission recently posted some freshly minted e-mail addresses in chat rooms and news groups to see what would happen; in one case, the first spam came in nine minutes. Addresses are sold and resold on CD-ROM's in batches of millions. If you have ever revealed your e-mail address in a public forum, or allowed it to appear on a Web page, or used it in buying merchandise online, your experience of the online world is sure to sound like this: ''Looking for love?'' ''$900 weekly at home.'' ''Fwd: Your winning lottery ticket.'' ''Biggee your penis 3 inches in 22 days.'' ''Have you received your cash?'' ''Hard core so intense it's sinful.'' ''Advanced degree = advanced career.'' ''Natural enlargement where you need it.'' ''Live chat room with real women!!''

Your correspondents claim to care about your health. Unfortunately, they care mainly about the length of your penis and the size of your breasts. They do not discriminate by sex; either way, you are assumed to feel inadequate. They offer implants and human growth hormone therapy. They are pharmaceutical enthusiasts, but we're not talking about penicillin; it's ''Viagra-Phentermine-Xenical-Propecia and MORE!'' They care about your finances. Here come the guaranteed paths to mortgage deals of a lifetime, cheap insurance, million-dollar prizes, hot stock tips and secrets of commodities trading.

How this bane came to sully the greatest revolution in personal communication since the telephone makes for a complex and troubling story, with no promise of a happy ending. From the beginning, the Internet has tried to fight spam with grass-roots vigilantism. Software companies now routinely build spam-filtering technology into their e-mail programs, and independent programmers are struggling to devise more creative methods for separating wheat from chaff. Millions of individual e-mail users are trying to devise coping strategies of their own. Consumer advocates are working mostly in vain to persuade lawmakers to take action in what should, after all, be a popular cause.

Each in its own way, for different reasons, these efforts are failing.

The modern epidemic began 15 years later, coinciding with the explosive popularization of e-mail in 1993 and 1994. A chain letter began to spread, titled ''MAKE MONEY FAST.'' And a pair of Arizona immigration lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, bombarded the Internet with a notorious advertisement about the ''Green Card Lottery.'' Angry recipients counterattacked, overwhelming the lawyers' service provider with complaints. But these proto-spammers were unrepentant. Eventually they tried marketing a book, ''How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and Other On-Line Services.''

Early Internet users reacted so angrily to commercial mass mailings that fake return addresses became a necessity. America Online and other large service providers began closing accounts used for spam. The next big step -- indispensable to the spam epidemic -- was the rise of free mail services: Hotmail, now owned by Microsoft, and Yahoo. Two features of the modern Internet (both more or less accidental) make spamming easy: service providers desperate for market share at all costs; and an architecture of relatively open and insecure mail gateways. Together these enable hit-and-run e-mailers to create quick, disposable, false identities. It's why so many of your correspondents have addresses like ''buffy0412xxxmeb13mxy@hotmail.com'' -- though that one, offering me ''eBay insider secrets,'' day after day, turns out to be not just a pseudonym but also a forgery, not a real Hotmail account at all.

For that matter, anyone named Buffy who sends me e-mail is a spammer, judging from my experience. A suspicious number of my correspondents now seem to be called James. It seems safe to assume that a sender named NoMoreConstipation68487 is a spammer. Likewise for Persondude1 -- but no, that turns out to be my 11-year-old nephew. Sorting the good from the bad looks easy, but it's a real problem, both for humans trying to manage their in-boxes and for artificial intelligence.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/magazine/09SPAM.html?pagewanted=all&position=top