Wight Portal For The Isle of Wight Community

Back when I first started using the Internet, there were loads of FFA, Free For All, sites. They were classified ad sites where you could sign up with your name and email address and have a few lines of space on a page in amongst thousands of other hopefuls, who thought that this method would lead to more traffic to their site.

What it did achieve for the owner of the FFA was to give them a huge list of email addresses to either send mail to them selves or sell on to some poor idiot who thought that he was buying a list of hot prospects ready to buy from him.

In either case if you had signed up to advertise, your inbox would regularly be stuffed with emails from people trying to sale their latest proven Internet millionaire making schemes. These sites were the beginning of spam.

The last few years has seen measures put in place to combat what is in essence a plague to the inbox,  with different filters and algorithms that try to reroute unsolicited email to a separate folder  away from the mail you want to read, but the upshot is some still gets through and some that is wanted to be kept is dumped into the rubbish folder, defeating the original object of the exercise, because now you have to check both folders just in case.

Spammers, intent on getting their messages read have now started to use covert means to get to your inbox. By forging the headers, code created by an email message, it is possible to send mail under a different guise, so as to not only fool the recipient, but to hide their true identity and make tracking the perpetrator more difficult.

The Internet big hitters such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and the social sites like Facebook, Twitter and so on, have both the clout and the cash to end spam. All it would take is, say a couple of hundred bucks a month each to set up a dedicated team who track down the source of the big spammers, like the online drug companies who flog cookie cutter sites to the idiots who think they can make money out of them, and close them down.
After just a couple of lawsuits, that Americans love anyway, the dedicated department would become self sufficient and would need very little financial help from the companies who set it up.

The fight against spam will only be won if the Internet big boys stand up to it in force.