The computer Internet has been likened to the Old West in America. It's wide open and full of promise, but wild and largely unregulated. And among the most notorious outlaws on this cyberspace frontier are people called spammers. They clog electronic mail in-boxes with billions of unsolicited, sometimes deceptive, and often pornographic sales pitches known as spam. But, Internet providers and the federal government say they're about to ride to the rescue.
The estimated 117 million Americans who use e-mail each day are mad, really mad, about spam.
Orson Swindle, a member of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which has been studying ways to dry up the deluge of spam, recently remarked that spam is about to kill the 'killer app', meaning e-mail, the Internet's most popular feature.
One frustrated e-mail user, Becky Quinlan, 30, works out of her home office in Sacramento, California.
"This morning, I opened my e-mail, and in my in-box there were about 60 messages, and about 30 of those were spam," she said. "Toys, cellular phone deals, software company ads from Canada, Nigerian money schemes - everything you can think of. They'll put in the subject line, 'Regarding, [re:] your call, so that you think that maybe it's in response to a message you've sent. And then, of course, you open it up, and you see pornography, or a Valium ad, or what-not."
Ms. Quinlan says getting rid of what she calls these wily spammers is harder than hitting a moving target. They play cat-and-mouse with the anti-spam computer software that companies and consumers install to catch them. One of their tactics is to deliberately misspell product names. Another is to stick gibberish or stray punctuation marks in the middle of the subject line, so the anti-spam filter won't recognize a name and block the e-mail.
And spammers create fictitious e-mail addresses. Like an unstoppable swarm of cockroaches, the minute you zap one piece of spam, 10 or 15 others for the same product spring to life.
Woe unto the frustrated consumer who responds to spam by hitting the "do not send" button.
"That's actually one of the worst things you can do, because by replying to their e-mail, you're actually confirming that your e-mail address is valid and working and viable," said Ms. Quinlan.
Hitting the "do not send" button can be an open invitation for an even greater avalanche of spam.
In October, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released the results of a telephone survey of nearly 1,400 adult Internet users. Researcher Deborah Fallows says one-fourth of respondents said they've cut back on the use of e-mail in anger at electronic junk mail and out of fear that legitimate messages are getting lost in the pile of spam.
"It's estimated that about half of the e-mail out there now is actually spam," she said. "Fifteen billion pieces a day. It's hard to get your mind around that volume of spam. Over half of the respondents told us that they were losing their trust in e-mail because of spam. Everybody's on the same side in this fight. Everybody hates spam, and everybody want to 'get' those spammers."
Especially pornographic spammers. So upset are people about lewd images popping in front of them, their children, and their co-workers that the Pew survey states "there's a special place in Hell for pornographic spam."
For that survey, an organization called TRAC, the Telecommunications Research and Action Center, also gathered four thousand of what could be called horror stories about spam. TRAC's John Breyault says people waste valuable time weeding out spam, cutting productivity.
"We heard from a priest who said, 'I can't check my e-mail with my parishioners around any more. Think of how embarrassing it is to open up a pornographic e-mail.' A number of people said, 'I went away for a three-day vacation and came back and had 1,500 e-mails stacking up in my in-box, and my whole service had been shut down because of this. I get so frustrated, I want to cry,'" he said. Beseeched by e-mail users to do something, the U.S. Senate in late October unanimously passed what's known as the Can Spam Act, meant to reduce the flood of spam by imposing tough penalties. Leaders in the House of Representatives say they, too, are committed to punishing spammers. They say there'll be a bill on President Bush's desk by year's end.
One of its provisions will likely be a do not spam registry, similar to one that millions of Americans recently rushed to get on, aimed at curbing intrusive telephone-marketing calls.