Silicon Insider: Climbing Mount E-mail

Sept. 3, 2002 -- Spam, spam, spam, spam, scams and spam …

A month into my African safari this summer I had a chance to sit down at a computer and log onto my e-mail. My fingers hovered for a moment over the keys. I had a premonition of something terrible about to happen.

It wasn't that many years ago, I remember, that I would plan my vacation days around trips to the computer. It was my umbilical to the world, and I didn't want my e-mail even to age for an hour before I got my hands on it and punched out a quick reply.

This trip I didn't even take along my laptop. In Zambia I even passed up on a chance to stop at an Internet café — not far from a fish market with the appealing ad painted on its walls "Guaranteed no Flies" — for fear that it would dampen my visit to Victoria Falls.

Remember when computers were fun? Remember the thrill of hearing "You've got mail?" Exactly when did this become drudgery? And precisely when did reading e-mail become a nightmare?

Staring Up at Mountains of E-mail

Looking back, I think I can say that I started hating e-mail the day the spam exceeded the legitimate messages. And I began hiding from my computer somewhere along that dark interval between the dot.com crash and Sept. 11. These days, the only news is bad, so what's the point of looking at headlines 14 times each day?

But now I found myself 10,000 miles from home. Surely that was a safe enough distance to re-approach the Web with an open mind, even with a little hope of a world grown kinder and more courteous in my absence.

So, as the roosters crowed nearby and the jackals howled in the distance, I jumped from the Kalahari into Cyberspace.

I logged on through an African ISP, its colorful home page reporting the news while somehow ignoring an entire continent full of slavery, mass murder, disease and famine. Then, on to my e-mail provider (whose name you don't need to know).

I had mail. God Almighty I had mail. I had — and the precision of the number was like a cosmic joke — exactly 1,000 e-mails.

There is something about 1,000 unanswered e-mails that makes you sit up straight even as your jaw drops. This is the Everest of e-mails. It is Kilo-mail. Just scrolling through it takes several minutes — especially on the 22K baud speed I was poking along at. Reading just the titles takes a half-hour.

Still, there's no choice: after all, buried somewhere in that mountain may be that one crucial missive that changes your life. And so, even as the kudu cooked on the barbecue and my children played with the farm dogs outside, I set to work deleting my way through the mountain.

It took three sittings and several hours, but I finally made it through the 1,243 e-mails (that's right, 243 more came in during that period: it never stops raining e-mails).

And, you are probably asking, in the end how many of those 1,243 e-mails were legitimate? Forty-two.

Trend-Spotting Through the Garbage

That's right. One thousand, two hundred one worthless e-mails. Of these, approximately 300 were mass-mailed press releases from corporate flacks who send me stuff in the hope that, after a quarter-century as a business reporter I might suddenly decide to write a major feature story on the exciting world of shoe store inventory re-stocking software.

These I don't mind too much, as they are part of the chaff of business journalism. If some PR person out there can buffalo her boss and keep her job by sending me that unread release, more power to her.

But that still leaves another 900 missives of pure garbage. Normally, for the 50 or so I get each day, my response is to simply ignore them. Like most of you, I'm sure, I can now whip through my e-mail list and pick out the real ones almost by the shape of the title.

But rolling through 900 of these babies you can't help but become contemplative. You begin to notice common themes, stylistic quirks, even larger social trends.

For example, spam seems to come in four forms, not surprisingly corresponding to historic types of human obsession. They are: porn, gambling, sexual potency/health, and get-rich-quick schemes. There is also a fifth form of spam, also historically found in the underworld: pathological resentment, in the form of viruses.

Interestingly, a few years ago, most of the spam I received was either of the porn or get-rich genres. Now I find the five types are about even in terms of quantity. Just as interesting, each type also seems to be morphing over time.

Porno, Suckers and Bad Medicine

Take pornography. A couple years ago, most of this type of spam I received, both on my home and office accounts, was pretty standard stuff — pitches for "teen" sites, college girls, porn stars, etc. What distinguished them was the crudeness of the titles … some so obscene that the perpetrators would have been arrested had they used the U.S. Postal System.

I found myself only visiting my e-mail account when my kids weren't in the room.

Lately, however, I notice that the titles have become more tame. Many are just plain sneaky, disguising themselves a legitimate messages ("Here's that information you requested"). However, at the same time, the content being offered has gone completely off the charts into some horrific netherworld.

Are there really that many Americans who've suddenly taken a consuming interest in bestiality? Are the nation's farm animals safe? What is going on here?

The same goes for gambling. With just about every state in the Union offering lotteries, off-track betting, and Indian-owned casinos — not to mention the ubiquitous office pools and cheap bus tickets to Atlantic City and Vegas — are there that many people who feel they aren't presented with enough opportunities to get suckered out of their hard-earned money?

Ditto with the health stuff. Drugs can be expensive, but who in the world would respond to a spam message from some unknown location offering discount rates on Viagra or anti-depressives? "Yeah, I bought my heart medicine from some nameless outfit on the Web. They sent it to me in a brown-paper package with Venezuelan stamps. But the stuff must work because I haven't blacked out in a couple days."

But let's assume that many people can't afford their medications, and that through trial and error they've had some good results buying drugs online (I know several people who get their cigarettes that way). OK, fine, but are there really men out there so stupid and desperate that they'll send money to a company for a drug that will make their penises three inches longer?

‘Here You Look This’

As for the job offers, these strike me merely as cyber-updates of the old posters stuck on telephone poles offering "up to" $5,000 per month working at home. And they probably have the same chance of success.

Like diet programs, exercise regimens and pyramid schemes, only the same small fraction of the population ever has the right personality and discipline to ever have a chance of success … and everybody else is doomed to failure.

Finally, we get to the hackers. First of all, is there anybody out there still dumb enough to open a .EXE file from an unknown (even a known) source?

Meanwhile, wouldn't you think (not to give anybody ideas) that somebody in Korea or China, after spending hundreds of hours writing code to create a virus, would spend a few extra minutes to write a title in proper English? A "Here you look this" title with a .EXE attachment and you'd have to be clinically brain dead to open that file.

I had about 100 e-mails of this type, plus about 200 more that were just gibberish titles with virus attachments. I erased all but a couple that managed to fool me … and those had already been blocked either by my ISP or the server at Forbes Inc.

In other words, not a single virus got through to me, and even if it had, it would have been blocked by layers of detectors at giant corporations.

The Ultimate Meaning of Spam

Meanwhile, with the rest of the spam, only a half-dozen of the thousand managed to trick me into opening the e-mail … and of those, exactly zero convinced me to open an attachment or visit or Web site, much less order their goods and services. This is a 100 percent failure rate, a figure I assume matched by most everyone I know.

So, as I finally erased the last bit of spam and walked out into the African night, with its strange sounds and trillions of stars, I was stuck by one last question.

Assuming that the spammers and hackers base their strategy on sheer volume — that is, that they can find at least one fool per every 10,000 e-mail addresses — at what point does the populace become sophisticated enough that the business model no longer works?

Or will, statistically speaking, the strategy always work — and spam and viruses just keep metastasizing until many of us give up on e-mail altogether?

Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” is editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised. For more, go to Forbes.com. And you can talk back to Silicon Insider via e-mail.