Good piece in today’s N.Y. Times on the continuing explosion of spam: “America Online says the amount of spam aimed at its 35 million customers has doubled since the beginning of this year and now approaches two billion messages a day, more than 70 percent of the total its users receive.”

Anti-spam tools emerge, the spammers figure out a way around them, better tools come along, the spammers adapt — it’s a perfect example of what my friend and colleague, Andrew Leonard, described as “the technodialectic” in his fine book, “Bots.”

Me, I’m getting upwards of several hundred spams a day now. It’s the curse of having had public e-mail addresses on the Web now for eight years or so. I like my e-mail addresses; I refuse to give them up. SpamAssassin is doing a pretty good job of filtering out 99 percent of the crap right now.

What’s notable in Saul Hansell’s piece are the absurd self-justifications and defenses proffered by the spammers. Here’s what one says:

“These antispammers should get a life… Do their fingers hurt too much from pressing the delete key? How much time does that really take from their day?”

Last weekend I received nearly 1000 spam messages. No, my fingers don’t hurt. SpamAssassin is my friend, and I know how to hit “select all,” then “delete” in my filtered-spam mailbox.

But at this pace of spam growth the burden on the Net’s infrastructure will at some point become insupportable. Spammers are “free riders”; their defenses are ludicrous, and their abuse is a classic instance of the “tragedy of the commons.” The Internet is our commons. We need to keep working on better ways to keep it from getting choked by spam.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.