Industry must confront the growth of spam

Like most computer users, I am menaced every day, and I mean menaced. That's, menace, as in Dennis the Menace.

As I am sure most of you will remember from your schooldays, this popular character from The Beano would regularly terrorise his family, friends and neighbours.

The victims of his latest practical joke were said to have been 'menaced' and often 'well and truly menaced'.

I also get menaced - by spam. It's inconvenient, it takes time to deal with, and there is nothing funny about it. It's a form of vandalism that leaves the victim worn down by the constant need to fix it.

At least one analyst predicts that, if spam keeps growing at its current rate, it will bring the internet staggering to a halt within a year or so.

I look at the 150 (and rising all the time) spams in my inbox every Monday morning and I can quite believe it.

Why does it keep rising? Well, whisper it, but according to the figures of one web monitoring company, spam works. It's hard to believe, I know, but the click-through on links within spam is somewhere between four and eight per cent.

Granted, this is probably true of the weight loss/cheap Viagra/hot teens end of the spam spectrum, but there are also those who really believe that someone in Africa will give them £1m for moving some money out of his dead father's bank account.

Spam is a pressing problem for many companies. Of all the email-related issues for the harassed IT manager, spam is the one over which they will have the least control.

Yes, you can install filtering software, if your network can cope with it and if you're prepared to deal with the user fallout as the filter removes some wheat along with the chaff.

But you can't tackle it at source. That's a wider problem and one the industry as a whole must come to terms with, and soon.

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