Spam spiders roam the Web collecting addresses

For some reason, my spam quotient has risen precipitously of late. I don't mean the unsolicited commercial that comes to the e-mail addresses I have used publicly. I expect those addresses to be collected by the people who search for such things to compile spam lists.

Instead, I've been getting daily chunks directly to my private e-mail address, which raises the question of how marketers obtained it. Or rather - since I know the spammers' techniques for doing this - I wonder why marketers use lists that must be very old and stale.

I know the lists must be old because every now and then editors will forget my request to use my public e-mail address with an article and will use my personal address instead. Usually, that e-mail address is used in the form of a "mailto" - people can click on my byline and automatically send an e-mail. Mailtos are easily harvested by the small programs called spiders that spammers use to collect e-mail addresses online - spiders roam the Net looking for such things.

Every time an editor runs my personal mailto, I get a nice batch of spam to that address in the following weeks. Indeed, the cause and effect correlation is almost admirable. But I haven't had my personal address run in months. So somewhere, somebody is selling on old addresses, and mine seems to have ended up on a list a great number of spammers have bought lately.

The e-mail I have received as a consequence has routinely demonstrated that the vast majority of online marketers send out great wads of stuff indiscriminately and ignorantly. They do not, as those groups who lobby on behalf of spam insist, use them as a precise and tailored marketing tool to reach clearly defined audiences who might be interested in their offerings.

Although I clearly have an Irish e-mail address, I have been getting pitches for discount phone services in the US. I receive advertisements for, as they promise, XXX-rated sites. And this past week, I got two pieces of spam which have proved successful, but not for reasons the senders had hoped - they are so completely ridiculous that I've forwarded them on to others just for the laugh.

One has as its subject, "How to see through people's clothes and mind". I thought I'd ended up on a mailing list for comic book readers - when I was a child there was always an advert for "X-Ray specs" in the back of superhero comic books.

This item was endlessly perplexing because you wanted to believe such things were possible but your parents always told you firmly that they weren't and that you definitely were not allowed to send off your allowance to buy a pair.

Yet, here was such an advert: "Have you ever dreamed you're able to see through people's clothes like Superman or James Bond? Now at last your childhood dream can come true. All you need to see through clothes is a special optical lens made in Japan".

What fun for the office. The second advert was just as foolishly bad. "How to meet beautiful women," it blared.

"Whether you are sitting at your computer or getting ready to go out, our pick-up methods are fresh and original and are proven to work!

"Do exactly what I tell you and - your success rate with women will skyrocket, beginning in as little as five minutes." .

So much for the power of targeted marketing. These are classic spams, where the strategy is simply that if you throw enough garbage at the wall some of it is bound to stick - and someone will be stupid enough to pay for these things. There's no attempt to find a particularly receptive audience - although God knows what that might be in the case of these spams.

And thus, one must view with enormous scepticism if not downright derision, the US

Federal Trade Commission's report on Tuesday that legislation to enforce Web users' privacy was not yet needed because commercial interests were showing they could police themselves.

In particular, it said, there had been a huge rise in the number of online companies - now two-thirds - which tell site visitors that their data, including addresses, names, e-mail addresses and personal likes and dislikes may be used for marketing purposes.

As a heavy Web user, I must say that I have never yet seen a straightforward statement of this - those sites that have such disclaimers tend to hide them away where visitors rarely go to search for them. The FTC doesn't seem to realise that being told your e-mail address is being harvested isn't the same as having consumer rights as to whether it's used.

What is needed is clear legislation, backed by penalties for violations, that allows people to opt in for marketing lists if they want to be on them. Not, as is so often the case now, tiny print that allows one to opt out of automatically being added to such lists.

Spammers claim few people choose to opt out, and add that even fewer request to be removed from spam lists. How disingenuous. They capitalise knowingly on the fact that people don't read the small print or don't realise they can say no. And, privacy advocates routinely tell people not to reply to spammers with "remove me" requests because, often, such messages are used simply to confirm to a spammer that the address is live, which guarantees more spam.

What is needed is strong and clear legislation to deal with spam, a nuisance which costs companies, Internet service providers and consumers millions annually to block, delete, and otherwise manage. If the State is serious about promoting a healthy Web environment to attract global business, then it is high time our legislators start thinking about controlling this scourge.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie