Bad spam, good spam

Electronic mail is dying. Instead of a quick tool for information exchange it's becoming an open port for all kinds of viruses, or just silly junk known as spam. Once your e-mail address has appeared in public, you're bound to get flooded with advertising, dating suggestions, con game letters, or something utterly unreadable sent to the world by a crazy idiot just for fun. Every day, you have to spend a lot of time to delete spam from the inbox, and trying to not delete something valuable by inertia. Sometimes, it's easier to call people on the phone than contact them by e-mail. Many people just stop reading their e-mail, and automatically delete all the incoming messages. Others have switched to SMS for short message exchange, but the mobiles have already become infected by the spam canker, which is even more annoying. Paradoxically, fax communication has attained more attraction, though it was often thought as a rudiment of the past a few years ago. I don't think this will last for long, since fax spam is becoming as possible as any other spam, with computers working as fax machines.

All the attempts to stop spam are bound to fail. There is no way to control every transaction and detect spam until the spammer quits and moves to another (possibly fake) IP. There are numerous open relay servers that do not send spam themselves, but only forward anything in any direction, thus making true spammers almost invisible. Even if spammers are eventually brought to the court, it is extremely difficult to tell them from "honest" advertisers, as long as any advertising at all is thought to be legal.

Electronic anti-spam systems are almost as useless. There is no rule that can clearly distinguish spam from a valuable message, and there is always risk to block a piece of important information, which can be even more harmful than spam. Using such filters for mere warning does not make the task of scanning through spam any easier.

So what? Will the future generations stick to paper mail, overburdened by spam? Probably not, especially noting that ordinary mail can as well be used for advertising (albeit more expensive). Hopefully a technological solution can be found, to stop any unsolicited mail by making each message highly individualized, to quickly detect spammers. But, I'm afraid, people can always invent counter-technology to each new anti-spam technology, and the more we rely on technological solutions, the more dangerous they become, allowing a clever criminal to put the blame on innocent people with a mere computer trick.

The final solution can only be social. Spam must be made useless, and no person should be as poorly educated, to ever conceive becoming a spammer. But this will require a drastic change in the social organization in general, and the ruling classes of today would rather prefer dead mail to an economic and social revolution.

Well, in the worst thing in the universe has something good in it. The procedure of deleting spam from one's mailbox can be very comforting and psychologically soothing, allowing an employee to distract from intensive work for a while without being blamed by the boss for playing solitaire, or watching porn movies on the Web. Just kill them one by one, and imaging that you're killing your pains and sorrows. Make your mailbox cleaner, and feel how all your life is getting cleaner with that. For such moments of quiet happiness, let gods bless good spammers, in all their spiritual misery.