Re:Viewing 2003: A year of spam, spam and more spam

"Well, there's egg and spam, egg bacon and spam, egg bacon sausage and spam, spam bacon sausage and spam, spam egg spam spam bacon and spam, spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam, spam spam spam egg and spam, spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam..." Will Sturgeon looks back.

Who would have thought a Monty Python sketch and a rather unappetising meat product would have become one of the tech talking points of 2003? But spam has very much been on the menu for discussion at all levels this year.

Governments took note, companies woke up to the problem of unsolicited email and vendors rubbed their hands together in glee as every man and his dog released an anti-spam solution.

This time last year spam accounted for around 40 per cent of all email - now that figure is closer to 60 per cent according to anti-spam vendor Brightmail. The numbers are important. While they were around 40 per cent, spam was an annoyance, an irritant, a nuisance but not really a business issue. In the summer, when the 50 per cent mark was passed, that emphasis changed - dealing with spam suddenly started appearing near the top of IT departments' 'To Do' lists.

Then even the politicians woke up. The UK government's All Party Internet Group even organised its first ever Spam Summit once enough constituents had complained about the obscene emails in their AOL and Hotmail accounts.

The role government has to play in winning the spam war is an issue silicon.com has been outspoken on this year. While politicians need to be seen to be doing something it's questionable whether they can actually have impact on the problem - this is a war which will be won by technology.

But this didn't stop some high-profile policy drafting. EU legislation is now in place to regulate what businesses can and cannot do with regard to email marketing. But there are more grey areas than an April sky.

Drawing particular criticism is the notion that companies are free to contact anybody with whom they have an existing business relationship with related product offers.

Speaking at an EEMA Spam Conference this month Jessica Hendrie-Liano, chair of the Internet Service Providers Association and partner in law firm Beachcroft Wansboroughs, said: "If I was Virgin and somebody came along and bought an airplane ticket I'd think 'Great, I can now send that person any marketing material carrying my Virgin logo' - and that's going too far I think."

It is an interpretation of the rather vague guidelines which a number of other people have made.

But of course it's not the responsible and respected companies such as Virgin that we should be worrying about. It's the criminals holed up in Boca Raton who account for the majority of spam. Speaking at the government's Spam Summit in July, Steve Linford of Spamhaus blamed the majority of spam on a group of no more than 200 individuals - which makes the inability of governments and law enforcement bodies to crack down on them all the more alarming.

Linford's contribution to the spam battle has been considerable this past year - so much so that he even made it into silicon.com's prestigious Agenda Setters top 20.

But perhaps the best accolade he has received is individual attention from aggrieved spammers who have sensed a shift in the balance of power and are targeting him and his company with increasingly devious and spiteful schemes.

The spammers would appear to be running a little scared now - which has to be a good thing.

The year started with silicon.com - in our own inimitable fashion - getting to grips with the issue of the 'Nigerian' 419 scams. Back in January we received an email from a Mr Madu Frank offering us a share of a vast unclaimed fortune in return for us providing him with a bank account through which to pass it - by now you are probably very familiar with this scam.

Of course victims never see any money but the bank account they provide is invariably cleaned out.

So we replied and entered into a discussion with Madu - which we managed to drag out for more than a month - much to his eventual annoyance. You can read the full version here.

Other quirky stories from the world of spam included Hormel, the largest producer of spam - the meat product - throwing its toys out of the pram and threatening to take legal action against companies using the word in association with unsolicited email.

Clearly Hormel's legal team has too much time on its hands.

But perhaps strangest of all is the tale of California man Charles Booher.

Booher had become so incensed by the constant offers of penis enlargement from one Canadian company that he started to reply - making threats against them and their staff if they did not desist.

Threats ranged from performing castrations using an ice pick and power drill to mailing the company parcels of anthrax through the post. Understandably it was at that point the police intervened.

Also taking revenge on the spammers this year was Russian deputy communications minister Andrei Korotkov. He became angered by a deluge of spam emails advertising an English language school and so he rigged up a telephone system which bombarded the school with thousands of calls, effectively carrying out a denial of service attack and crippling their phone lines.

They'll certainly think twice before spamming a communications minister - deputy or otherwise.

But in general spam was not a laughing matter during 2003. Estimated costs had US businesses picking up a bill for $10bn as a result of it this year - and the picture is equally bad this side of the Atlantic.

One of the biggest threats on the horizon, which has become a real talking point in the latter half of 2003, is the threat of legal action. One US company is already facing the very real threat of costly employee litigation over the levels of offensive pornographic spam flooding inboxes.

Employers are seen to have a duty of care and those failing to protect staff from offensive and upsetting material appearing unsolicited in a work email account are now being seen as negligent... let the litigation commence.

Companies have lost half their email capacity to the spammers, and the problem doesn't just stop with infrastructure or legal costs. Spam even cost one Nigerian diplomat his life. A victim of the 419 fraud in the Czech Republic blamed the Nigerian Ambassador for the crimes of his alleged countrymen who shot him dead.

Incredibly the 419 scam apparently now represents Nigeria's fourth biggest industry, according to some sources - and equally incredible is the fact people are still falling for it.

Figures for the past year reveal that 150 people in the UK have been duped by this ploy. On its own that doesn't sound too alarming but the average lost per individual was a staggering £56,675 according to the National Criminal Intelligence Service - a figure inflated greatly by the fact a couple of victims were already millionaires before being tempted by the fraudulent 'get-rich-quick scheme'.

Sympathy is pretty thin on the ground for such individuals though - but it is still a major concern that funds garnered through this ploy are being channelled into organised crime such as the trafficking of people or drugs.

As such not only do these gullible individuals have to be protected from themselves but the rest of us need to be confident that this scam will soon end.

Fortunately the predictions for spam in general are all positive - after a fashion, as everybody concedes it will get worse before it gets better. But it will at least get better - and according to one leading industry figure it will all but vanish within three years.

Back in June Enrique Salem, CEO of Brightmail, said: "I think the level of spam may get as high as 65 per cent of all email before this starts turning around but I don't think it will get any higher than that. And while I don't think we will ever see spam disappear altogether I think it will drop so low as to be a non-issue.

"I expect to see levels of spam falling through 2004, 2005 and by 2006 I expect to see spam levels certainly sub-10, probably even sub-five per cent of email traffic."

Perhaps that is the brightest glimmer of hope to take from a year in which spam has become one of the largest and most frustrating challenges facing businesses.