Junk mail - enough is enough ( 2003-09-26 09:40) (Shanghai Star)
E-mail is such a
communication panacea that few would like to forgo it willingly. Many of us
remember with a tinge of nostalgia those innocent days when we opened our
mailbox and found only replies to our letters to Aunt Sally, Uncle Bob and the
kids.
No longer.
Yours truly, who considers himself only a small fry in the e-mail world, now
gets on average 20 junk mails every 12 hours, offering super solutions to a wide
variety of problems that I am told behove me to look into: I need to slim at
least 20 kilos to look presentable again (actually, I weigh only 64 kilos) and
also that some of my equipment is not only just too small, it usually
malfunctions. And this is why all girls laugh at me.
Luckily, via the junk mail, I get to learn of a doctor who can prescribe
Viagra on the Web and I can get my equipment functioning properly again. Then
there are the daily and very tiring attempts to seduce me, in the raunchiest of
languages, to subscribe to some girly photo-movie outfit.
I am by no means a prude, on the contrary, but a daily dishing up of what is
a very enjoyable pastime in the most banale of languages is just too much to
bear. Even for yours sincerely ... and that is quite something.
Actually, the novelty has long worn off and, like most of us hapless
e-mailers, I too have to grin and bear it when I find my mailboxes clogged with
junk mails and blocked to important mails. Again.
The problem is getting worse every day, despite allegedly clever blocking
programmes.
One way to get around the junk mail problem would be to charge for each
e-mail sent. Even a few euro cents each would stop those guys with mailing lists
with five million or more names.
Then there is the hacking and virus problem. It is inconceivable that
Microsoft has persisted with operating systems that have eight or more ports
open for anyone come in and have a look. The sad thing is that Windows XP has
been launched relatively recently and nothing substantial can be done till the
next launch, a few years away.
As for virus designers and distributors as well as slanderers, subversives,
anti-establishment guys, owners of bomb making Web sites etc. they would be
stopped in their tracks as long as an indelible identifier is included in each
e-mail and web posting.
"Infringement of the First Amendment" I hear angry Yanks shouting. No, not
really. Freedom of expression? Sure, but then with the name of the
"expressionist" attached, in a way that is at least traceable by the law. Few
newspapers are prepared to publish anything without knowing the name, address
and often the phone number of writers of letters to the editor, so why should
the WWW (World Wide Wait) be different?
