The problem with electronic spam detection is that it can never be wholly accurate. There simply is no way to have a piece of software distinguish with complete certainty between spam and not-spam. One solution to this is to presume that every email is spam, and then ask the sender (by return email) if it is spam or not. If the sender presumes all email is spam, however, they’ll simply reply asking if your question regarding their previous mail is spam, to which you’ll reply and ask … and on it goes.

So if software can’t decide what is and is not spam, surely one route to take would be having another human being filter your mail (maybe through a subscriber service). However, this begs the question “what is spam?” One man’s spam is another man’s business opportunity of a lifetime, after all. There’s also no way for anyone other than the recipient to determine with absolute certainty that the email is unsolicited. Even then, some unsolicited commercial email is actually useful. Well targeted, informative commercial mailings can be useful as much as they can be a pest – I’ve discovered some good services that way in the past.

Ultimately, it falls to the recipient to filter their own mail. Even that’s not easy to do, however, as spam is designed specifically to look like it’s not spam. Legitimate email can look like spam too, making the problem more difficult to deal with. I’ve deleted emails from my own brother-in-law before now, thinking that they were spam. There are lists available of addresses that are likely to be sources of spam and can be checked against, but even these are not necessarily accurate so a manual check has to be performed still.

There have been suggestions that charging a small amount (a fraction of a cent, for example) to send email would solve the problem. Legitimate users wouldn’t care too much if $1 bought them 400 emails – but in the volumes spammers send mail that would hit them hard. I wonder how much of this idea comes from the notion that postal spam isn’t a problem simply because the volumes are manageable. I don’t think this is necessarily the case. Postal spam is surrounded by a totally different mindset. When deciding to whom a postal mailout should be sent, the sender evaluates their target market, buys in a corresponding list of address to match, and then carefully picks the most opportune time to send. That’s why offers of new credit cards arrive in January when your pocket is empty.

Such a concept occurs not to the senders of spam (spammers, or scumbags if you will). This puzzles me immensely, especially when there’s so much categorized data out there for free. Just look at usenet – all those email addresses neatly grouped by an individual’s interests. Ethical marketeers (oxymoron?) would love to be able to use that data if they weren’t scared their mother would find out. If I’m a .co.uk then there’s simply no point wasting your bandwidth telling me that I can get my prescription drugs from Canada, coz duh I can get them right here on the NHS. Why the least ethical profession in the world (that of the spammer) would overlook this sort of stuff and go for the spaghetti/wall approach is a mystery.

The thing that really peaks my intrigue is that for this torrent of spam to continue, someone must actually be buying this stuff. There are men out then on the street with penis patches under their shirts. It could be the guy you’re stood next to in a lift or on the tube. The guy who sells you coffee is still waiting for his free cable to get installed, and has his life insured by john.thomas@dirtytricks.com. There’s probably fishing enthusiasts out there who’ve sent off money in response to an offer for a b1gger r0d. I recently heard a statistic of the number of people (I think it was two) at any one time who are sat in a hotel lobby somewhere in the world waiting for an Algerian wearing a red carnation.

But if there are people making money out of this, you have to wonder who these people actually are. Are there people with business cards that proudly state Spam Manager or Director of Spam? Do you start off as a Junior Spam Assistant and work your way up to Senior Spam Engineer? Goodness knows.

One thing I do know is that with spam, sometimes the sender doesn’t even know that it’s spam. To them it’s a Fantastic Business Opportunity or an Exciting New Service. Some spam is only spam once it’s received. On that basis it’s either never going to go away, or it was never real to begin with. I’m going to spend this weekend pretending it’s not real and see how I go. I’ll let you know if it works.