If you’ve maintained the same e-mail address for more than a few months, you know the feeling. You sit down with a cup of coffee to read through the daily mail, anticipating glad tidings from friends, but message after message turns out to be worthless, or worse. Your in-box is filled with Viagra ads, strange garbled documents that appear to be written in code, enticements to view pornography.
Untold billions of dollars have been poured into the problem of combating spam, and untold millions of hours have been wasted scrolling through unwanted messages. President Bush waved a wand and promised the problem would disappear when he signed into law the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, “imposing limitations and penalties on the transmission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet.” Anybody notice any less spam since that law was passed? By some estimates, the percentage of Internet traffic that is spam now exceeds 60 percent.
