If The Truth Fits

Whenever I see a piece of spam pop up on in my e-mail client, its a slight annoyance, but I just accept that its ‘one of those things’ and that we can’t stop it being sent to my inbox, but hopefully a filter will be able to stop me from having to read it. I guess that there are people that are more pro-active than me, because instead of just trying to stop themselves from reading the spam, they’re trying to stop those billions and billions of junk e-mails even being sent to your inbox.

According to this article from the Associated Press, a company called McColo Corp. was shutdown last week after it turned out that they were the half of almost half of the world’s spam e-mails. Spam accounts for 90% of all e-mail sent around the world, so if these guys were responsible for half of all spam, that means that there is about 45% fewer e-mails being sent around the world right now. I know that sounds really impressive, but the article goes on to say that you can never really kill the spam monster, within a few days or weeks there will be just as many e-mails circulating around the world telling you about some great v1agra offers that you should really be interested in.

I don’t think I’ve actually opened or read a spam e-mail for at least a couple of years. I use Gmail and it seems to catch just about everything and put it into the spam folder, which I’ll give a quick browse to check that it hasn’t been overzealous and picked up something I actually want to read, then I might have a swift chuckle at the titles of the spam mails, and click delete all. I’d always presumed that everyone else did the same, but apparently not. 1 in 12,500,000 spam e-mails actually result in someone signing up to that porn site, buying those cheap medications from Canada, or, of course, trying to pick up some little blue pills on the cheap in the hope of stirring things up in the bedroom. Those figures come from the results of a study by computer scientists at University of California, Berkeley and UC San Diego, who decided that the only way that they could get accurate data about spam was to actually spam people, and in a 26 day period they sent 350 messages, yielding them just 28 sales, a record that even poor ol’ Gil Gunderson from the Simpsons wouldn’t be proud of, but apparently that’s enough of a hit-rate for big-time spammers to rake in a couple of million dollars a year, and whilst they can bring in that kind of cash I’m sure that they won’t be stopping any time soon.

Oh, and if you thought that you had it bad when it came to annoying spam clogging up your inbox, think about poor Colin Wells, who has around 44,000 spam messages going through his server every day. He used to spend up to two hours a day tapping away at the delete key, but seems to have got things under control now with some effective filters, so if there’s one lesson that you can learn from this article, its that whilst spammers never quit, neither do the good guys, and you can almost always take back control of your inbox.

I’ve read about this story a few times on my travels around the web today, and I’ve found that every single one of those stories felt the need to point out that this is NOT an April Fool’s style prank or faux-feature, possibly because Google are so well known for the hoaxes that they spring upon a very skeptical public every April 1st, some of which were pretty obvious (does anyone else remember Google PigeonRank?), and some of which were so crazy that they had an air of plausibility about them (Virgle? It made so much sense!). I’ve always thought that one of these years, Google would pull the old switcheroo and launch a real product on April Fools Day and not get involved in the web’s April 1st shenanigans, since I’m sure it would confuse the hell out of people, which would probably be the funniest thing they’ve done for Fool’s Day for a few years.

Sorry, I’m afraid I went off on a bit of a tangent there, Google announced a new product today which seems to have caught a lot of attention. It is called ‘Mail Goggles‘ and can be enabled in the Settings>Labs tab when you’re using Gmail. The idea behind it is that there are quite a lot of people who after a night out on the sauce might come home and decide that they’d better check their e-mails before they go to bed, just to see if anything really important has come up, but in the process they might decide to tell a few people what they really think of them in a few e-mails that they’ll probablycertainly regret sending in the morning. These people need protecting from themselves in their inebriated state, and that’s where Mail Goggles comes in. Once enabled, it will activate itself at certain times of night and over the whole weekend (Googlers must party hard at weekends!), and before you are allowed to send an e-mail it will ask you to complete a number of fairly simple maths problems (though you can alter the difficulty level) within a time limit. If you complete the problems, your e-mail will be sent, if not, Google will tell you to have a glass of water and go to bed (no, really).

Whilst I’m sure that if I were really determined to send an e-mail telling them that “they should go to hell” then I would make sure that e-mail got there, I might start by simply disabling ‘Mail Goggles’ (duh!), but I do think its a fun little feature, and it might actually be pretty effective. For one thing, I remember coming home (staggering home, some might say) from a night out, and for some reason I decided it would be a good idea to try and play sudoku on my phone (yep, you can even play sudoku on an iPhone, it can do anything!), after staring at the screen for a minute I’m pretty sure I fell asleep, so maybe Google are onto something with this whole numbers angle. Also, I think that if I were to fail at completing the maths problems once then it might set off a few alarm bells in my head that it might be a good idea to re-read that e-mail, maybe they shouldn’t go to hell, just New Jersey?

As Ars Technica comments, it would be really great if someone made something for cellphones on Friday and Saturday nights!

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