Tomorrow's World

Spam is the real curse of the Internet and that is why I'm dealing with it first.

Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.

The best estimates say that there are fifteen billion spam e-mail messages a day.

To find out more about spam visit Fight Spam on the Internet.

Just a few thoughts about all of these unwanted spam messages.

According to the US Census Bureau there are nearly 6.5 billion people on this planet. So we get two and a half messages sent every day for everyone there is! If we assume about a billion Internet users, then everyone gets an average of fifteen messages :-

  • Now if every one of these messages takes an average of ten seconds to deal with and this costs just a penny in terms of time and extra hardware and software, then the worldwide cost is about £55 billion in a single year. This estimate is probably on the low side as a lot of spam messages are destructive and cause severe computer problems and hence are much more expensive to fix.

    How far would this money go in fixing the world's problems?

  • Consider too the affect of spam on the fight against terrorism. If spam were eliminated, then the number of messages would drop by perhaps seventy per cent.

    Wouldn't this make it a lot easier to find e-mail messages that had a criminal or terrorist connection?

  • Many companies and individuals refuse to have anything to do with the Internet because they do not want to deal over an insecure medium, that propagates filth, fraud and other scams. Eliminate spam and many more people will embrace the good parts of the Internet.

    Would there also be environmental advantages in using e-mail instead of a letter?

You can also see that if we all fight spam and eventually reduce it, then this will help everyone in a lot of positive ways.

So we must all be vigilant about spam. We must detect it, fight it, report it and above never respond to it!

We must also make sure we don't send out messages that could be construed as spam!