If you're among the tens of millions of people who dread turning on their computers every morning - knowing full well you're about to be bombarded with crude sex messages and all sorts of other obnoxious spam - Gerald Thain has some depressing news for you.
Thain is a consumer law professor at UW-Madison and somewhat of an expert on the subject. He's a member of the TransAtlantic Consumer Law Dialogue, a group that meets once a year and lobbies the United States and Europe to support pro-consumer legislation.
And he thinks people need to understand that, even though the United States passed the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003 and even though many individuals and businesses have installed spam filters - none of which are 100 percent effective - we're essentially just "shoveling back the tide."
In the United States alone, the cost to businesses was more than $10 billion in 2003 - $4 billion from loss of productivity and $6 billion from the cost of dealing with spam.
And according to a recent Stanford University study, the typical Internet user spends the equivalent of 10 working days a year deleting spam messages.
There are millions of spammers worldwide, some 100,000 of whom are hardcore. Many have fake addresses and are virtually impossible to track down. That's especially true of those who operate overseas and, as such, aren't affected by the CAN-SPAM Act.
And while many have very sophisticated operations, spamming is so easy - and inexpensive, in most cases costing less than 1/60th of a cent per e-mail - some spammers actually do operate out of Internet cafes in Nigeria and other poor countries, hoping to find one or two suckers who'll respond to their "urgent" pleas for money.
"Many people are really raking in the dough," Thain says. "I mean, it doesn't take a wizard to figure out you don't need to have much of a response to make a profit."
There is one potential solution, Thain says: Requiring a postage fee for all e-mail messages. Even a minor charge - say, a quarter-cent per e-mail - would be so costly for spammers who send millions of messages daily that they'd have to immediately shut down.
The problem, Thain says, is that "some people would see that as the elephant's nose under the tent - both in terms of cost and in terms of getting the government further involved in the Internet, which many people are concerned about. So it's highly unlikely we'll see that any time in the near future."
In fact, fear of identity theft is so prevalent that, according to one survey of 22,000 people in 26 countries, about 50 percent of consumers are now reluctant to engage in e-commerce transactions of any kind, Thain says.
Certainly you should never respond to a spam message, he says, "because it just indicates to spammers that their message got through and they'll merely redouble their efforts."
Actually, there is a way to totally eliminate spam, he says - by setting the filter on your home computer so that you only receive e-mails from people whose addresses you've listed. The problem, of course, is that anyone who's not on the list - like, say, an old college buddy you haven't heard from in years - won't be able to get through.
Thain says he doesn't want to leave the impression that the situation's hopeless. But it's going to take an intensive, well-funded international effort to solve the problem - and even then "it's going to be a long time before we'll see significant light at the end of the tunnel."
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