The Internet: Spam: The Death of Email

The Way It Was

In the early days of the Internet, email was a Godsend. You could communicate without encumbrance with friends and colleagues anywhere in the world instantly and effortlessly. You could attach files to your emails containing documents, photo­graphs, diagrams, data and even programs. There was no fear of viruses then.

If you wanted to find any information on any given subject — or even on a product or service — you just emailed a search engine and a little later it returned a list of web addresses in order of relevance without any commercial bias or weighting.

Traditionally, one simply did not send unsolicited commercial emails. It was seri­ous­ly frowned upon and likely to get you shunned by the Internet community. An intro­ductory email was fine. But one never pestered.

This way of working was called pull. You, the enquirer, were the one who took the initiative to go out into Cyberworld and look for whatever you wanted to find. You pulled information towards you. It was simple and effective.

Invasion of Commerce

But then the eyes of greed were turned upon the Internet. Commerce saw a new land of milk and honey it could exploit, corrupt and pollute. The whole architecture of the Internet had been designed to be a completely open means of communica­tion. The technology did not lend itself easily to the protective and cagey method­ologies of commerce.

I remember that for ages in the computer industry press the 'experts' were racking their brains to think how to turn the Internet's pull methodology into the push methodology of so-called free-market commerce.

Push is the term they used for the way commerce works. Push means that whether you want a product or not at the moment, you get continual advertising rammed down your throat every day about every last possible product or service you may not want, may never want and which may never be appropriate to you anyway. That way, the world of commerce thinks, the moment you may have a use for any product or service, the ones utmost in your mind will be those who pestered you the most. But you are the one who has your time and mental energy continually sapped and wasted sifting out their everlasting torrent of rubbish from your rele­vant thou­ghts.

Birth of Commercial Spam

So vast corporate web spiders combed the web for email addresses and accumu­lated them into enormous databases. Then they set up automatic mailers to spam and spam and spam the hell out of those addresses, causing their hapless recip­ients to have to waste hours of their time desperately trying to sift out genuine personal emails from all the excrement that was deposited in their mailboxes every day. Think of the personal lost time these commercial spammers cost the economy.

Later, they greatly increased the sizes of their mailing lists by capturing people's email addresses on web sites and categorising them according to which products they could best try to pester them to buy. You must have innocently given your email address at a web site after being enticed to gain access to 'the next level'.

People of course complained. The technical among us put thinking caps on to find a solution. That solution was to set email servers to automatically block emails from offending sources. That worked, but not for long.

The Spammers Hit Back

The way the commercial spammers overcame this was to recruit thousands — prob­ably millions — of gullible individuals to send out spam on their behalf with a promise of vast easy profits working from home. This heralded the Spam Storm that hit the Internet in the summer of 2003.

It proved impossible to block these spam emails because it would mean blocking hundreds — if not thousands — of individual email addresses every day. So here I am, sifting through about 50 emails a day trying to sell me pills to make my private parts bigger and better, help me lose weight and get lower mortgage interest rates. It matters not that I have no use for any of these products and could not buy them anyway because they all emanate from the United States where I have no means of paying for them. They are just a thorough and detestable nuisance.

Roll of Dishonour

One possible way of fighting back that I thought of and was intending to implement was to set up a web page listing all the individuals who sent me spam emails as a universal Roll of Dishonour. But then something happened that changed my mind.

One day I received a spam email offering me an easy way to enlarge a certain ext­ernal organ of my male body. I receive hundreds of these a week. Everybody must receive them. Even female friends of mine (whose email handles do not belie their gender) receive them. But the stark discovery was that it purported to be from me. It was addressed to somebody else at the same ISP, copy (CC) to a lot of other people including me.

Needless to say, I was incensed. I dived into the source code to see what was be­hind all this. I quickly translated lots of HEX code to reveal the email's convoluted route around the Internet and the person from whom it seemed to originate. His 'name' was Johnny. He was on a Unix machine. I have his full details. But I as an in­dividual have no power to do anything about him since his server was in the United States.

This meant that a lot of the people whose email addresses appear in the FROM field of a spam email probably know nothing about it. The spammers are simply harvest­ing email addresses from the Web and using them as the unwilling and innocent supposed originators of the spam.

A Roll of Dishonour web page would therefore be unfair and defamatory.

Of course, I could put the names of the companies and their products on a Roll of Dishonour web page. But I am sure that their names are well and truly hated by almost all recipients of their spam.

An Unfortunate Consequence

The unfortunate upshot of this latter practice is that emails from innocent indivi­duals are now getting blocked by ISPs. For example, a very dear friend of mine can no longer email me at my AOL email address. She has been blocked. Now, I think she would be one of the last people on Earth to engage in spamming. She has a successful career in which she is making lots of honest money and has no time or inclination to send spam. Yet AOL has blocked her.

Perhaps her email address has been hi-jacked and used by a spammer. Or perhaps she is an innocent victim of AOL's own spam reporting facility. Suppose somebody who received an ordinary personal email from her hit the AOL report spam link while viewing her email? They may do it maliciously. Or they may even click it acci­dentally or impulsively as they are working as rapidly as possible to purge the morning spam from their inbox. Result: all AOL users are now off-limits. She cannot communicate with them. She and I now have to communicate through a mail box I have with another ISP — a mailbox I keep 'unprotected' for that very reason.

Now, being inundated with spam is one thing: but having legitimate emails from fri­ends and colleagues barred from your mailbox is in my opinion far more of an en­cumbrance. Friends, colleagues and other legitimate contacts may think you are just ignoring them. It means that you cannot be reached by a means of communi­cation upon which society now expects one to be reachable.

Blacklisting The Innocent

I have had my email address since April 1998. I have never sent any spam or junk emails in my life. Neither has anybody else ever used my mail address to originate emails of any kind. I never send or forward emails via a mailing list. I avoid keeping a mailing list for reason that it could possibly be hijacked. I get email addresses for my correspondents from people directly or from their web sites. Usually, however, I simply use the reply function of my email client to reply to what I receive. Other­wise I write to people who invite response. I only write to people who invite respon­s­es on the subjects for which they invite responses. I have never sent any email for comm­ercial purposes.

Notwithstanding, I am now having to account to people for why they have not re­cei­ved replies from me, which is very embarrassing and possibly more disruptive than spam email itself. The reason apparently is that my email address has now been blacklisted by a so-called spam protector known as blacklist.netcore.co.in. I think it is a product of a company called Netcore, which I think is based in India.

More recently, I have also been blacklisted by another irresponsible know-it-all en­terprise called Spamhaus, which prevents me communicating by email with those of my friends in the UK who unfortunately have British Telecom email addresses. It also means that, as an ex-pat, I am unable to reply to emails sent to me by the British Foreign Office. Rather, I can reply to them but the Foreign Office's email ser­ver refuses to accept them. Thus I am reduced to having to reply to them by sur­face mail, which can take over a month to get there. Doubly problematic when the Foreign Office stipulates a reply deadline which, while being very reasonable for email, is unattainable by surface mail.

It should be noted that the cheeky response, which the rejecting email service kicks back at me, actually mentions my name, saying falsely that I am a source of email spam. The relevant record on the Spamhaus website also mentions my name. That I think constitutes a tort of defamation against me personally, although, as a lone individual living on a basic pension, I am financially powerless to do anything about that.

I complained to Spamhaus. Strangely, Spamhaus's mail server accepted my email and I received a human reply. Spamhaus's excuse for wrongly blacklisting me is that my email account [which I pay for] is within the same IP address domain as a num­ber of serious spammers, and that the Spamhaus domain reputation system is not built to distinguish between individual email addresses within the same IP addr­ess domain.

On 13 March 2023, I had to send some important medical information concerning my son to my son-in-law, who has a Gmail account. I had spent two days preparing the information in an '.odt' file. I wrote an email to my son-in-law with the file attached and also a PDF version for printing. Google bounced the email with a PERMANENT rejection. It didn't even put it in my son-in-law's spam folder, which, if it had, I could have messaged him via Signal to tell him to expect it there.

The return error message cited my email address [which contains my name] as an unauthorised email address, strongly implying that I was attempting to send spam email. I was given a link leading to a page with an extremely complicated proced­ure I had to go through to get authenticated. It turned out that I had no means of implementing the required authentication anyway. The only way to get it there was via DHL, which would require 5 days.

Fortunately I knew somebody near my son-in-law with a non-Google email account and got the documents to him that way. I advised my son-in-law to get a non-Google account as I had previously advised my friends to get non-BT accounts.

On 07 April 2023, I spent quite some time carefully writing, and then sent, an email to my wife's nephew about my wife's terminal illness. It contained an important observation for him to pass on to the medic who deals with her case because he is in a far better position to liaise with her medic. Unfortunately, her nephew's email account is with Google [gmail]. And, of course my email was permanently blocked by the new gmail "security" system. So I could not get the information to him by mail. I had to wait until I knew I could reasonably interrupt to call him via WhatsApp and read my email to him. He had to make notes as I spoke. But I suppose we must get used to diminishing services this way as the big corporations get ever more powerful and thereby ever more able to act as they wish with impunity.

Email nowadays, increasingly, cannot be relied upon unlike as in the past. Yet, again increasingly, email is an essential part of public infrastructure, which everybody is expected to have. To hold oneself out as a public email service and then to take it upon oneself to arbitrarily block an important email, from whatever source, without any tangible reason or qualification, is an inexcusable act of public irresponsibility. This is quite apart from the fact that Google's mention of my name in the rejection message strongly implies a tort of defamation against my name and my character as an email user.

But then, of course, against any lone individual, a large American corporation like Google can act with total impunity.

Sounds like a Vietnam carpet bombing approach. Who cares if we collaterally gene­cide millions of innocents so long as we get the bad guys. I declare this to be un­acceptable. I also declare the use of such anti-spam mechanisms by ISPs and gov­ernments to be unacceptable. An individual member of the public, who is using a public ISP service, is a legally separate person and has no interdependence of res­ponsibility with other users of the ISP. My contract with my ISP is simply to provide me with an email service, independently of anybody else who may also be using that same ISP's service. I have no contract or any other relationship with any of them. Spamhaus's approach to hitting spammers is like a Judge hanging everybody who was within the vicinity of a murder to make sure the actual murderer got hang­ed. My message to Spamhaus and their ilk is simply: if you can't do the job proper­ly, don't do it. If your analytical programs cannot discern legally separate individu­als, either find some way of doing so or cease and desist.

My mailbox address has been current for a very long time and has been published widely within my global on-line community. Consequently, many people all over the world know that is where they can reach me. It is not therefore feasible to change it.

I have experienced personally, and heard of, cases where organisations who send out spam emails substitute the email addresses of innocent people in the FROM fields of their spam emails. And as I have said, I have even received spam emails purporting to come from myself. I have traced IP addresses of originators of "my" spam emails to university campuses in both the United States and Japan.

Examining the MIME of some of my returned bone fide emails it appears that my emails are rejected because blacklist.netcore.co.in and Spamhaus reject all emails originating from my ISP. This, in my opinion is both rash and irresponsible. My ISP is a very large provider and consequently hosts thousands of completely indep­endent individuals and organizations. One of the communities [at the time of writing] using the Netcore blacklist facility is the Open Source community for the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Consequently, despite my great interest in Ubuntu, I am now un­able to communicate by email with this community and hence I am unable to parti­cipate therein.

Email is correspondence. The emails I send are my correspondence and personal communications with family, friends and official authorities. The likes of Netcode and Spamhaus are actively interferring with my private correspondence. This is in gross violation of my human rights as layed out in Article 12 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rightes of 10 December 1948. But I don't expect Netcore, Spamhaus, British Telecom or Google need to bother themselves about that. They are well big enough to be above law and human rights.

Something Must Be Done

Fine. We all know that those who send spam emails and the companies whose pro­d­ucts they push are undesirable elements we all wish would just disappear. They are nothing but a thoroughly disgraceful nuisance. Email was never designed to be or intended to be a means of commercial promotion. I am sure that with the major­ity of us, these undesirables will gain the voluminous negative publicity they well des­erve.

Nevertheless, unless something is done to eradicate spam from the Internet in a way that does not cull innocent emails from innocent people, then email as a means of communication will die. We will once again be writing letters on paper.

Perhaps that would be a good thing! It should be good for DHL, to whom I have had to resort in order to reply to official emails sent to me by the UK government. Even then, I have had to act instantaneously upon receipt in order to have the remotest chance of getting my reply back to them within their stipulated deadline!

All this makes me think it really is time for a new world order: one in which the position of the lone individual is actually respected and accommodated.

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© Aug 2003 Robert John Morton [re-edited Oct 2006, June 2018]
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