Sponsor's Message

If you're going to separate people from their cash using the net as a lever then you'd better have something pretty special to offer them in return.

Well I think I know what that "special something" might be.

Just look at a couple of the stories being carried by the news wires today:

Pre-Christmas spam is up from eight percent of all email last year to almost 40 percent of all email this time around.

But I don't think I'm telling you anything new when I suggest that spam is a very real and rapidly growing problem.

Then there's another revelation: the number of emails generated by, or containing a virus have doubled in the past 12 months, with one in every 200 messages now affected.

So can anyone guess the best way to make a squillion dollars on the Net?

Readers Say (updated irregularly) From yesterday... Time to stop spam... - Cliff Lymree spam... - D.Marshall Spammers... - Rob Paradise/TelstraClear... - Tom Lymree.co.nz. spam... - Brett Have Your Say

Yes, that's right -- just invent a safer, more secure, spam-proof and virus-proof alternative to the present email system.

Of course this is a huge ask, which is why nobody's been able to pull it off yet.

The very reason that email is so effective is that virtually everyone who uses the Net has an email address and, to be of use, an alternative system must have the same universal acceptance.

For a little while it appeared as if the now ubiquitous instant messaging (IM) services might just pull this off. ICQ was at one stage the most dominant player by far and even I had the ICQ client sitting on my desktop -- it was great!

But then spammers found out about it too and, without any simple way of filtering spam, the signal to noise ratio gradually deteriorated. What's worse, IM spam was even more annoying and had a far more disruptive effect than email spam.

Then, to make matters worse, Yahoo and Microsoft both came out with competing (and incompatible) IM products which effectively fractured the market so that there was only a less than even chance the person you wanted to contact used the same IM client as you.

Microsoft, and AOL (who by now owned ICQ) bitched and fought over the vexing issue of interoperability and as a result a fabulous opportunity was lost.

Then, in true Microsoft style, just as their client was becoming dominant, they screwed it up by introducing a few security holes that shattered people's confidence in having this back door installed on their PC.

So where to from here?

Is it possible that an alternative to email could be devised in such a way that spammers were locked out, viruses could not be unintentionally transported, yet everyone you know could be contacted?

Well yes, I think so.

However, the biggest hurdle to the introduction of such a system would be the email filtering and anti-virus companies. They have so much to lose that you can bet they'd work very hard to prevent such a system succeeding -- and then Microsoft would come along with their own version that would not only fragment the market but introduce an endless line of security holes.

On second thoughts -- we're all doomed! :-)

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