Why is Spam Blocking so poor? In an Internet industry that breeds programmers, why have they not been able to solve this problem? Spam, Malicious emails containing viruses and all the other email cons that the security programmes and others keep telling me about, emails asking for all your details from what you had for breakfast, to the name of your bank, your account number, where you live and your post code come in from all over the world, including many from Nigeria along with spam trying to sell me anything from how to become a millionaire to how to make parts of me grow four inches longer or how to build a perpetual motion machine, flood into my computer every day. I personally know of two people that have been dealt savage blows when they have been conned into the get rich quick schemes promising them enormous amounts of cash to help money come from Nigeria and many more that buy expensive programmes that will make them a fortune on the internet.
In the last two years I have been using the internet more and the amount of spam I suffer has increased dramatically. Some of the reason for this may be because I am using the internet more, but I do feel that spam and emails fishing for information has increased over this period. This may be because I have been researching double strollers and jogging strollers for the web site I have created, but I am now spending longer and longer clearing out my in box and spam box of all kinds of rubbish that can not be turned off, no matter what the legal position is about having the right to close down the ones you do not want. In fact trying to tell them not to send you any more emails can make the situation worse. There must be a better way than just deleting them, for them to reappear the next day.
As the world economy has shrunk, putting many people out of work, many have turned to trying to earn their living on the internet, internet crime and fraud along with money making deals offered by so called Gurus telling us they can make us a fortune in two weeks. In fact many of the fraudulent programmes are put together from programmes sold to make money. Email list gathering is one example of how an automated programme can harvest email lists to be used by criminals as well as get rich quick internet entrepreneurs. I am not sure if it would be possible to make this harvesting illegal or if it could be policed if it were illegal, but if this were to be stopped it would go a long way to halting the spread of spam emails.
The way Windows deals with spam is absolutely useless and if spam gets into the in box and you tell Windows, with three clicks, to add it to your spam list, it disappears from the in box and goes into the spam box, meaning that you have to delete it again and still not be sure that it has been given the coup de grace.
A programme called spam fighter is quite good at tackling both the short term as well as the long term problems with spam. It asks you if you just want to delete or if you want to add it to your banned list or your good list or to send it to them if it is hard core, all with one click, as they do collect spam that its customers say is hard core spam and work world wide to attempt to verify it as hard core and help close down the sites that abuse the system. The problem is that Windows does not like spam fighter and throws its icon out of Outlook Express and makes it difficult to get it back for the ordinary user. I think the programme does interfere with Outlook Express, but rather than fix the problem they boot it out.
Good minded people send lists to all their friends around the world and ask them to send the list to all they know, to warn them about a so called virus being spread. I do wonder if the person who started the whole thing going is waiting to harvest the gathered list of hundreds of emails.
Until Windows, Macintosh and all the other providers get together and make a concerted attack on spam in all its variations, it will carry on breeding and propagating until the once wonderful experience of surfing the net becomes a nightmare that could, in time, destroy the internet or make it impossible for the average user to navigate to every spam laden site on the World Wide Web.
0 comments:
Post a Comment