Weapons of Mail Destruction

The situation has progressed to the point that legitimate emails from freinds that I want to hear from may never reach me. Why? In a word: SPAM.

I no longer have the time or patience to look through hundreds of advertisements to find that one message that may be from someone I actually know. So, I filter my email. Creating an email filter means defining a criteria whereby messages are judged by merit. First, you take an hour or so to log every single known friendly email address into a data base of allowed contacts. If you are willing to commit more time to this process, certain subject field phrases and all-inclusive domain originations are also submitted so as to be allowed to pass or fail the screening. Emails that meet the criteria make it to your inbox and become relevant. Emails caught in the filter are deposited in your recycle bin and become nothing. Sometimes important communications fail the test and become nothing. If your operating sytem crashes (as Windows often does), you may need to start your filtering process all over, from scratch.

If you have a website, it's more of a challenge. There are robots that crawl the web harvesting email addresses to be used for the proliferation of SPAM. So, I have converted my online email address to a photograph of an email address, instead of actual text. Now, I have discovered that robots using imaging technology can read this, too. If that's not enough, a spammer can use "spoofing" to send you an email that appears to be from yourself, or someone you trust.

The evil of this is: a message from a long lost friend whom you are dying to hear from will never reach you, even if he or she happens to obtain your email address. Such a message in a bottle will not make it past the SPAM filters. If you are in business, just imagine trying to receive communications from potential clients. EBay'ers argue amongst themselves daily because emails caught in SPAM filters never reach their destination. "The seller never sent a request for payment!", "Liar! The buyer never responded to request for payment!", etc.

We need 'Weapons of Mail Destruction', or a way to obliterate SPAM once and for all. Prominent mail client providers, such as AOL, Yahoo!, and Google's beta Gmail, have invested millions of dollars to create electronic methods to detect mass mailings and otherwise unwanted email. This does not help most users who retrieve their email from their own domains and ISP's. Microsoft has lagged behind in providing such a service for users of its mail clients, Outlook, and Outlook Express. Every time I check my email and see hundreds of SPAM messages, I become quite angry with Bill Gates for not protecting me.

The community of online service providers are well overdue to come together so as to provide a standardized email authentication system to protect us. Call it caller-I.D. for email. The big barrier is that email is free. Spammers don't pay a penny more than you or I emailing each other, or the business that sends bulletins to employees and customers. We need to employ standardized software that intelligently sorts SPAM out of our legitimate email. Technology already exits to do this. What's the hold-up?

Jim