Spam flood may cause Net loss

I knew it had finally gone too far when I started getting spammed by a slew of companies wanting to sell me anti-spam filtering programs that would finally free me, once and for all, from spam.

They arrive every morning and afternoon, each new batch of unsolicited anti-spam advertisements clogging my In Box as annoyingly as the rest of the electronic junk that constitutes 90 percent of the day’s e-mail.

Anti-spam spam. Who could have guessed?

I suppose there’s some modern comical irony to be found in all of this, but right now I’m too busy hammering away on my delete key to be amused.

If the steady flow of standard porn ads weren’t enough, now I’m getting smutty come-ons in Spanish and German. Then there’s the daily glut of home mortgage spam, prescription drug spam, “enhance-your-reproductive-anatomy” spam, and all manner of creative scam spam from people claiming to be descendents of African and Middle Eastern royalty who desperately need me, their trusted friend, to hide their loot from merciless revolutionaries.

If e-mail is supposed to be the simplest, most efficient form of global communication ever devised, why does it so often seem like little more than an electronic Pandora’s box filled with time-consuming aggravations?

According to a recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a Washington nonprofit research organization, 70 percent of computer users in the country now complain that the proliferation of spam has soured their online communication experience and caused many of them to question whether the technology is worth the daily frustrations.

Not only do one-third of users fear that spam is ruining legitimate correspondence among friends and co-workers, but a quarter of them have become so fed up and distrustful of the technology that they’re weaning themselves from their years of reliance on e-mail.

“Many people we hear from are contemplating getting off the Internet altogether,” a telecommunications researcher lamented in a recent New York Times story about the spam problem.

Many of the people surveyed said they are taking matters into their own hands rather than continue to be held hostage by spammers. Keyboard vigilantes, willing to spend countless hours in a battle for e-mail justice, are reporting every piece of spam they receive, changing their addresses regularly or setting up temporary accounts in an effort to keep the spammers from hijacking their mailboxes.

On Monday morning, while wading through a weekend’s worth of spam from mortgage lenders, Viagra vendors and male-anatomy extenders, I was reminded that Maine already has a law on the books that is intended to alleviate this problem for the state’s e-mailing population.

The state’s spam law went into effect last month, in fact, and requires all unsolicited e-mail to carry “ADV” in the subject line or “ADV: ADLT” if the e-mail contains material not suitable for anyone younger than 18.

The new law allows the state or an individual to sue for damages of $250 for each violation, which would be a fine thing indeed if we could actually come up with all the money necessary to prosecute the pests that have usurped our mailboxes. But we can’t, of course, as the director of the Maine Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division made clear when the spam law went into effect.

“No state has the resources to go after these people alone, even those states with far more resources than Maine,” said Assistant Attorney General Linda Conti.

Clearly, this is one unanticipated breakdown on the information highway that needs a major overhaul.