KEY POINTS:
A delightful email arrived this week from Dr Zozo Spener, a Bank of Africa audit manager in Ouagadougou, capital of the West African nation of Burkina Faso.
My joy at receiving Dr Spener's message wasn't related to the US$20 million ($29.5 million) he was offering to share with
me. It was more that his email triggered a warm sense of nostalgia. It brought back memories of a simpler time, when Nigerian advance-fee fraud ruled the spam world.
These days the junk email folder is full of a dreary mix of stock tips and pharmaceutical product offerings. At least the "419" fraudsters of Dr Spener's ilk (named after the section of the Nigerian criminal code they are famous for violating) have a story to tell, however bogus it might be.
With so much spam being pumped out it's no surprise the occasional 419 offer still makes it through internet service providers' groaning filters.
Security company Symantec says "health" messages - emails touting pills, medical treatments and herbal remedies - are the biggest hindrance, accounting for 27 per cent of all spam. "Financial" spam, including stock tips and loan offers are close behind on 26 per cent, followed by "product" spam at 23 per cent. Sadly, "scams" such as Dr Spener's account for only 4 per cent these days.
Symantec says 80 per cent of all emails sent in December were spam and 35 per cent of that was the particularly troublesome image spam.
Another email security specialist, Marshal, believes image spam accounts for 56 per cent of all spam.
Spammers have turned to embedding their unwanted messages in images because humans can read them just as easily, but they are harder for spam filters to identify as junk.
The rise of image spam has been a disaster for ISPs because the messages are typically four or five times larger than text-only emails, so huge amounts of storage are needed to process them.
A pattern seems to have emerged over the past year in how ISPs deal with spam.
A particularly bad flood of spam will hit an ISP, causing long processing delays over days or weeks. The ISP's consumers, understandably, get grumpy. The ISP installs extra mail servers, which patches the problem for a few months, at which point the cycle starts again.
Bradley Anstis, Auckland-based director of product management for Marshal, argues ISP underinvestment, not the proliferation of image spam, is the cause of the problem.
"They have been making do with fairly minimalistic single-layer type anti-spam technologies for quite a while and now they're suddenly catching themselves out with that lack of investment in those technologies," he says.
A favourite spammer tactic is to fire off millions of emails to addresses which may or may not be valid. Processing the undeliverable messages is a laborious, futile task for ISPs. Anstis believes email volumes could be cut by 65 per cent if invalidly addressed emails could be purged.
Businesses large enough not to be tied to ISP-based internet access services can use "receiver rules" to block connections to senders of large amounts of invalidly addressed spam.
Sadly, ISPs seem to have ruled out implementing a similar scheme for clients because of the cost and hassle. Instead, they seem wedded to fighting the spam fire by tacking on more hardware each time the problem gets desperate.
Does this open up an opportunity for an ISP willing to take a different approach?
Neil Sherratt, the Hawkes Bay-based founder of secure email company Bizibox would like to think so. His company's technology allows emails to be exchanged securely using a web browser interface. Taking email delivery away from the public protocols of the internet means Bizibox's technology is also immune to spamming.
With spam bumping up the cost of providing email services, ISPs would no doubt love to find a way to recoup their growing investment in mail servers and filters.
Perhaps packaging up a service like Bizibox's to complement a standard email offering would allow a clever ISP to both generate new revenue and give frustrated emailers a spam-free alternative.
Meanwhile the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill is expected to become law as early as next month, bringing with it fines of up to $500,000 for organisations and $200,000 for individuals convicted of spamming.
Given most spam originates from overseas the law won't have much impact on our in boxes, but will at least show our legislators are taking the issue seriously.
