Internet experts predict that by the middle of this year 80 percent of all email worldwide will be spam. What “kind” of spam do you get most?

Most people would probably answer “adult-themed material”, or, in short, porn. Although porn was the spam leader in spam’s infancy, today’s email InBoxes are filling up mostly with ads for healthcare products. About 40 percent of all spam delivered touts sexual enhancement drugs, miracle diets, hair restoration, cheap medicines, etc.

In second place? Financial products. Cheap loans and mortgages, get-rich-quick-schemes, stock tips, the like. About 38 percent of all spam.

Third place? Direct sales. About 13 percent.

Surprisingly, porn comprises only 5 percent of spam, though your personal experience may vary. As part of the CAN-SPAM Act passed by Congress in 2003, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last month required all spam email that contains sexually explicit material to contain the phrase “SEXUALLY- EXPLICIT” in the Subject line, as well as in the electonic equivalent of a “brown paper wrapper” in the body of the email message. Obviously, this rule, if the spammers comply with it, would make it easier for consumers to discern porn spam from other emails without opening and viewing the contents. One would simply create a rule or filter in their email application to automatically move any email with the SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT phrase in the Subject line into a Junk mailbox, or even directly into the TRASH. A quick glance at the 300+ spam emails captured at the server level in one of my accounts (we’ll talk about how that’s done as we continue this thread in coming weeks) revealed that only a few contained the required wording in the Subject line. It remains to be seen how well this ruling can be enforced.

So how do you end up getting spam anyway? Is there any way to avoid it completely, or is it just a necessary evil that is the price of doing business if you want to participate in today’s plugged-in world? Can your email address retain its innocence, or will it inevitably be corrupted by life in the big digital city? Let’s follow an email address from “birth” and see where it could possibly “go astray”.

So, you get your new high-speed DSL connection and decide to bring into the world a cute and cuddly new email address: you@dsl.com. Remember that discussion you had in Philosophy 101 (or at the local coffee house) about whether or not people were born “good”, and how external factors determined whether or not they turned “bad”? I know it’s a rather oblique parallel, but hang with me.

From the moment of birth, the very second your Internet Service Provider enters your new email address into the World Wide Web “Book of Names” – even before you ever send or receive any email – the “Evil Spam One” is plotting to turn that pristine new creation into a receptacle of Trash. How? Gather ‘round and I’ll tell you.

One of the tools in the spammer’s bag of tricks is a program that generates email addresses. It takes common email suffixes like @Hotmail, or @Yahoo, and adds either known or possible username prefixes to them to make them into complete addresses. The program may randomly generate every possible combination of numbers and letters (like aaa@dsl.com, aab@dsl.com, etc.), or draw from a database of common names, much like those “Name Your Child” books. You get the spam and throw it away without replying, but the spammer still gets confirmation that it’s a “real” email address, and the deluge begins.

How’d that happen? Find out next time!

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski