Various and Sundry: Now Everything But Photography

I didn’t receive vast numbers of spam messages until I got one of my first “Dot Com” internet accounts for home. It was with Netcom.com (now Earthlink.net), who were pretty big at the time. It was a nightmare on my computer, though, and it didn’t last. I can remember the thing downloading all of my e-mail to my computer multiple times, and keeping multiple copies of it in whatever e-mail program came with the floppy disc they distributed like wildfire. Part of that had to do with my ignorance of the difference between POP and IMAP clients, but that’s beyond the point. I first started getting spam on that e-mail account, but it wasn’t that much.

I wish I could say the same thing today. I don’t have solid statistics to back this up, but the public-facing e-mail account I use gets about three spam mails for every one authentic e-mail. There are times during the weekend when that’s more like a 10:1 ratio. And that’s AFTER the spam filter hits the worst of it. In the past couple of years, my work e-mail account has started getting spam, and I don’t use that for ANYTHING on the web or in registering anything. Someone else, sadly, was not quite so judicious in their usage. Now we all get to pay the price.

The spam filter has its good days and its bad days. This weekend, it was particularly bad. But that’s life. I wouldn’t give up e-mail at any cost anymore. That’s why I giggle at people who like to whine that not only is e-mail broken, but that it should be killed all together. Really? And replaced with what? IM? That’s a system dedicated to teenagers who can’t type terribly fast, have no reading comprehension skills, and make up inane abbreviations for every little thing. I use IM, don’t get me wrong. It can be handy at times, but e-mail is the only way to go. It isn’t nearly as distracting, and it gives me the opportunity to think while I write, if I so wish.

And, of course, once your IM address ends up in the wrong hands, you get spammed on that, too.

Blog comments turn into the playground of shady characters looking to drive up their Google pageranks.

Skype is starting to get hit by what amount to telemarketers.

Can they leave nothing alone? Is there nothing good in this world that can’t be utterly destroyed by the evil and the greedy, abetted by the dumb and the ignorant? Can’t any single thing be kept clean? I hate people. I really do.

This entire rant/nostalgia trip was kicked off by this story:

Technology News: Security : Report: [tag]Spam[/tag] Accounts for Most E-Mail Traffic

Nearly every e-mail consumers receive — some 86 percent — is considered spam, either malicious or simply “unwanted content” today, a new study provided to TechNewsWorld demonstrates.

“Of the 25 billion messages we processed in May, an astounding 86 percent were malicious or spam,” said Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini, a messaging security firm based in San Carlos, Calif.

As if that wasn’t enough of a headache for corporate IT departments, instant messaging spam soared by 500 percent last month, just as businesses are embracing the technology for customer communications, and increasing their own usage of IM by 138 percent.

It really is getting to the point where the only way to stop this stuff effectively is to make everyone pay for it, which would also destroy the internet. I don’t even mean a two-tiered internet. I just mean postage for e-mail. It has to be just enough to provide a financial disincentive for the spammers to spend thousands of dollars on millions of e-mail addresses to send offers to. And I don’t want that.

Heck, I still think, sometimes, that the internet died about eight years ago, when stories about the internet stopped being how cool the thing was, and more about “What special interest/minority group isn’t properly represented on the internet?” That’s when you know it’s gone mainstream. When it ceased to be a playground for geeks and became the opiate for the masses, the spammers got their teeming masses to pitch to.

On the bright side, we don’t really have Black September anymore. The beginning of the new school year doesn’t result in a flood of newbies clogging the ‘net. They’ve already had it most of their lives, for the most part. And AOL isn’t the sole province of the newbie, either, but just another (large scale) ISP.

Stop the world; I want to get off.

(Coincidentally, John C. Dvorak writes this week about the end of the Golden Age of the Internet.)