From the moment Postel demonstrated the inherent flaw of electronic mail, its weakness was exploited. An early and quite accidental exploit involved "vacation" by Eric Allman. That program was designed to monitor a mailbox and return an "on vacation" message to anyone who tried to reach an out-of-town recipient. Another Berkeley student liked the hack, applied it to his own mailbox and took vacation at the same time as the author. Two copies of the same program exchanged "on vacation" messages until the server crashed under weight of a full disk.
Most early exploits took the form of chain letters and bulk mailings of stale content. An occasional email virus kept things interesting. But during the first seventeen years since Postel's Weakness was documented, the internet remained a comparatively small community. Exploiters were easily tracked and those annoying chain-letter people were kept more or less in check. By the early 1990s, that would change dramatically.
By 1993, the internet community faced a flood of newbies, people attracted to the global network by the promise of riches. The following year, the gold rush culminated in annoyance. In 1994, the game changed for good. On April 12th, Laurence Cantor flooded the internet with an email message that advertised services provided by his Arizona law firm:
Green Card Lottery 1994
May Be The Last One!
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.
PERSONS BORN IN MOST COUNTRIES QUALIFY,
MANY FOR
FIRST TIME.
The backlash was inevitable. Cantor's ISP was flooded with complaints from the established internet community. The innundation brought down the company's mail servers. In response, Cantor's account was terminated. The community had its first true taste of spam and the review was not flattering. Cantor went through a series of ISPs and finally penned his manifesto, How To Make A Fortune On The Information Superhighway.
Since that first attack, spam has grown by leaps and bounds. By some estimates, it accounts for half of all internet traffic. In the last three years alone, the amount of spam as a proportion of all email traffic has increased by 350 percent. Mailboxes are flooded because spam is based on volume.
By some estimates, spam results in a sale just 0.000005% of the time. In order to reach fifty dumbasses, a spammer must unleash somewhere around 10,000,000 messages. There was a time when one needed to trek far and wide to be inconvenienced by the stupidest 0.000005 percent of society. Spam changed all that. The labor necessary to compose a message for 10,000,000 million people is comparable to the labor necessary for one email message. Unlike junk catalogs that are delivered by the postal service, the cost of spam delivery is absorbed mainly by the recipient, not the sender.
In order to compose lists large enough to yield sales results, spammers rely on various tools to acquire an adequate number of email addresses. Internet bots scour webpages for mailto: links. (Blog Day Afternoon encodes your email address in order to thrawt this style of theft.) CDs filled with harvested addresses are purchased from other spammers. Dictionary attacks on mail servers yield active addresses. Known aliases such as webmaster@domain, postmaster@domain are added to their collection. As a result, it's extremely difficult to keep your personal information safe from spammers.
For years I was able to do that. As the rest of the world cursed the contents of its inbox, I was greeted by messages that were actually intended for me. That changed a couple of months ago. A trickle of spam became a deluge. Since my username is jeff, I assume they finally guessed correctly: jeff@domain. To make matters worse, I'm the postmaster of three domains and the webmaster of four. The deluge was inevitable.
Stopping spam is my current obsession. I installed Spam Assassin on my mail server. Now I add additional anti-spam rules almost hourly. I subscribe to an anti-spam mailing list whose traffic is heavier than the spam intended for me. Who cares? I'd rather throw out fifty legitimate messages that I don't care to read than see one more fscking spam in my in-box.
