Spam with everything

Spam, originally, was just Spiced Pork and Ham, and lived a quiet life in unassuming little tins on store shelves. Then Monty Python brough...

Spam, originally, was just Spiced Pork and Ham, and lived a quiet life in unassuming little tins on store shelves. Then Monty Python brought it fame with his Spam Sketch, in which a man and his wife walk into a cafe full of Vikings and find themselves stuck with spam 8212; and more spam. The waitress tells them they can have quot;egg bacon and spam, egg bacon sausage and spam, spam bacon egg sausage and spam, spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam.quot; Slowly, a crescendo of spam builds up and the Vikings break into song: quot;Spam spam spam spam spam! Lovely spam!quot;

The point is that when there is a lot of spam about, it tends to drown out everything else. At Python8217;s cafe, even the awesome quot;Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in the Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and a fried egg on topquot; was overwhelmed by a dressing of spam.

In the mid-nineties, spam became a powerful metaphor for Usenet, which was being inundated with junk postings indiscriminately cross-posted to hundreds of newsgroups. In a word, cyberspace was being soundly spammed.

At that time, though, no one took it seriously. Spam was part of the fun, the background noise of mass decentralised communications. But over the last two years, spam has spread beyond Usenet and latched on to email. The signal-to-noise ratio of cyberspace has deteriorated sharply, causing much breast-beating all round. To pack the whole volume of spam mail riding the wires every day around the world, you would need as many gigabyte hard disks as you could pack into a very large bookcase. That8217;s a lot of junk mail in passage and everywhere, people are paying its fare. Subscribers pay telcos and ISPs to download it. Telcos pay each other for transit rights. Everyone is losing a lot of money, and is getting steadily madder.

Last week, matters came to a head in a US district court in Pennsylvania, where Sanford Spamford8217; Wallace, CEO of Cyber Promotions cyberpromo.com, filed suit against his backbone provider AGIS agis.net for throwing him out of cyberspace. Spamford, 28, is King of the Spammers, the most hated individual in the whole digital universe. Every day, he sends out a few million emails on the behalf of small businesses. Spamford says he is defending their basic right to advertise. AGIS says he is a threat to civilisation.

The result of this case will determine, to a great extent, the future of Net advertising, which is still a relatively unregulated industry. Unsolicited email is the cheapest form of publicity on earth, but it is going out of control. A couple of years ago, some entrepreneurs realised that email directories would become a resource much in demand. They started mining the Net for addresses and started mailing lists to get more. Then they punched it all out on CDs that carried a million addresses at a time.

These were used by small businesses through bulk mailers. Then, when the volumes got out of hand, the businesses stole time on other corporates8217; mail servers. That got them very mad, because a million mails can lock an organisation out of its own server. Besides, many addresses were out of date by the time the CDs came out. Bounced spam added to the gridlock on the Net. Finally, the professional spammer was born 8212; people like Spamford, who had inventories of brand-new addresses and undertook to spam the world on your behalf.

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There isn8217;t likely to be comprehensive legislation on spam for some years, despite the Spamford case. For now, we8217;ll just have to live with it, using the basic safety rule: don8217;t reply to it. If you do, you tell the spammer that he8217;s onto a genuine address. Soon, it8217;ll be stamped on other CDs. More and more CDs, all over the world, until the day you spend an hour downloading your mail and find only spam, spam, spam, spam, spam.