SimonB

According to News 24 on May 3, 1978 the worlds first spam email was sent out by a marketer to around 400 unsuspecting users in the USA. What must have seemed like a “good idea at the time” started a train reaction that has caused severe problems on the internet.

From a, shall we same “harmless start” back in the 70’s spam has now become a huge ugly beast frustrating millions of internet users world wide. To show just how bad it’s getting take Googles Gmail as an example. Google who currently offers the best free email service when it comes to spam proof emails reported that between 2004 and 2008, spam received by its customers climbed from 20% to around 80% and thats really bad considering that only about 1% of that spam actually reaches the end user after passing through gmails spam dump. I currently receive over 400 spam emails a week, so much for the good old days.

The question though on everyones mind, Is there hope for the future? Will we ever be free from these evil gremlins? Sadly the answer is NO, not in the very near future anyway.

However, on the bright side, there is always some good news in South Africa, and a recent example shows just how powerfull team work can be at eradicating such unwanted trash!

According to mybroadband.co.za “the local blogging community has lashed out at a local spammer“. The result you may ask? It took only two days for the spammers domain and emails to be frozen by the hosting company. This victory may seem small, but considering the fact that more than 29000 people are now free from this spam, it looks like a good achievement for only two days.

What can we learn from this example?

If we all as a community, work together by 1. reporting spam 2. Making sure that we have up to date antivirus and spyware software installed (which prevents your pc acting as a spam machine controlled by spammers remotely) and by 3. working closely together as a team then hopefully in another 30 or so years we could just maybe, kill this evil that is the spam empire.