Home
Up

Spam

Although the Internet has fast become a means by which we can all communicate with great efficiency, it, like many other great inventions of our times, has become a tool that has benefited the meaner side of our society as well.  Who amongst us hasn't received the unwanted email announcing that you can make thousands of dollars in a few weeks by investing a few dollars.  Or the message telling you about the special sale on this website or that.

Chain Letters 

The first example is a chain letter and, whether it be through regular mail or electronic mail, is still illegal in the United States and many other countries.   Chain letters are a familiar occurance in regular mail.  Someone sends you a letter with a list of ten names and addresses on it.  It asks you to send  a certain amount of money to all the names on the list, remove the first name, add your name and address to the bottom of the list and send copies to five, maybe ten of your friends along with the same instructions.  Supposedly you'll reap a large amount of money in a short time.  Because of the exponential nature of the mailings it doesn't take many levels before you've exhausted the population of the entire United States.  The chain dies out quickly and the only people to benefit are those who started out at the top of the list. 

What the Internet has provided is a means by which the person originating the message can reach thousands of "friends" without having to invest a large sum of money for postage nor a large amount of effort addressing envelopes.  Aside from finding such messages in you mailbox you may also find them posted in usenet newsgroups (know as "Chat Rooms" and a host of other designations in some circles) where the audience probably numbers in the thousands and they don't have to post but one message to one area.  And if they're successful in pulling in a few thousand dupes to perpetuate their scheme they'll have a nice lump of money in a few weeks and the people who sent the money are still waiting for their share to come rolling in.

Your best bet is to ignore these messages and encourage others to ignore them.   Even if the message claims that you're doing or receiving a service in return for the money exchanged, it still only enriches the few. 

Spam

The second example is called "spam",  a message blasted out in a massive emailing to people who have not requested the information.  In either event it's generally a waste of time for the person and a waste of resources on the Internet.   Often they'll apologize for the intrusion.  Sometimes they'll offer a means by which you can unsubscribe from the list.  Usually this doesn't get you anywhere.   The return addresses are usually phoneys or oneshot accounts that have been abandoned after their purpose has been served. 

Where did they get your email address?  Possibly from some other mailing list or lists to which you've subscribed.  Another source for your address is in newsgroups.   When you post a message to a newsgroup your email address is embedded in the header.  It's a simple task to write a program to scan thousands of messages and accumulate the addresses within them.  How can you prevent them from picking up your address?  The best method is to lie about it, at least in the newsgroups.

Okay, lying about your address has it's downside too.  You have to make anyone who might respond to your post via email aware that the address is bogus and instruct them as to how to derive your true address.  If you're using a news reader such as Agent, Free Agent or Netscape, you can enter virtually any address you'd like as your reply address within the program's configuration.  Many posters on newsgroups will place the word "NOSPAM" somewhere in their address, usually within the post office site, and leave instructions in their signature file (a bit of text that's automatically appended to all of their posts) to remove that particular string from the address before sending a reply back.  Frequently the signature file will have a dummied address in it too.

Hoaxes

Another waste of time that keeps recurring in email are hoaxes.  These messages are similar to chain letters in that they tend to spread themselves quickly.  Hoaxes, unlike chain letters and spam mail, aren't motivated by money.  They're generally a malicious attempt on the part of their creator to spread some havok on the Internet, increased traffic, wasted storage space and wasted time.  Let's not even think about how foolish it makes the participants look. 

There are a couple of  well known hoaxes that have generated off-springs.   The first of these is probably well known by its title, "Pen Pal Greetings."    The gist of the message is that there is a destructive virus being spread and it's being done in the form of a message whose subject line contains the text "Pen Pal Greeting" or some other specific text.  The message goes on to warn anyone who receives such a message not to read it, that the simple act of opening the message will cause a highly destructive virus to be unleashed on his machine that will attack the hard drive, burn out the monitor, smoke the sound card and curse all future generations of his family.  Take our word for it, no email message, by itself is capable of doing such a thing, though executable attachments may possess this capacity.  But no simple text message can execute a virus. 

The harm isn't in the reported virus-message, but rather in the message that you receive warning you of the virus-message.  The message will ask you to forward this warning on to "everyone you know" so that this insidious plague can be stomped out.  The gullible reader who forwards this warning to his or her friends, or entire mailing lists, is doing the real damage by sending this garbage to a large number of people, some of whom may end up sending it to yet another batch of friends until we can now identify every gullible person in the country by tracing back the path of the forwarded messages.

A more recent hoax that has started to mutate involves, spuriously, the head of Microsoft, Bill Gates.   The message begins by saying it's been sent by Bill Gates himself.  It goes on to say that they're testing a new email tracking system and that if you forward the message to all your friends, the first x-thousands users who forward the message will receive money or software from Microsoft.  The entire message is hogwash.  More recent versions of this hoax have included Nike and Disney as co-agents in the venture, promising something from them if you participate. 

Though it may seem harmless in it's base concept, "just pulling a harmless prank" (some people just want to leave their footprints in the sands of cyberhistory,)  there are some consequences to such a message being propagated to many systems.  Because most users will simply forward the message it soon becomes deeply nested in multiple forwards.  Some email systems have a difficult time dealing with messages that are nested too deeply.  An email system can sometimes be brought down by a message that has gotten more complex than was ever anticipated by its designers.  

Some links dealing with spam

Here are Web sites that discuss Internet hoaxes

Computer Virus Myths, (http://kumite.com/myths)