Monday, December 30, 2002		Feature

THESE e-mails provide sex products you never ordered, offer you hundreds of gifts and freebies, and take up valuable account space — welcome to the annoying, fast-growing world of junk mail.

Spam, as junk mail is called, began innocuously enough some seven years ago with Internet users receiving bogus offers like the US Green Card Lottery. Today it has grown to be an e-menace that knows no geographical boundaries.

Internet service providers (ISPs) in India are not spared the scourge of spam. "Foreign spammers are setting up shop regularly on Indian ISPs and something needs to be done," Suresh Ramasubramanian, head of the Indian branch of Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) International, told IANS.

Ramasubramanian has proposed setting up "Internet exchanges", which will help India-based e-mails to be shared rationally among local ISPs rather than being routed through overseas destinations.

"In India the spam level is increasing heavily although it’s still low compared to international levels," said Ramasubramanian. Such a trend, he believes, has led to widespread blacklisting of the Indian Internet addresses.

"Figures for spam in Indian users’ mailboxes won’t be completely available as many still use foreign free mail accounts like Hotmail or Yahoo!," he said.

The situation is growing worse due to lax or non-existent anti-spam policies among Indian ISPs. There has also been a lack of security precautions on Indian servers, leading to security holes such as ‘open relays’ and ‘proxies,’ technological loopholes, which are easily exploited by spammers.

Pornographers globally are responsible for some 30 per cent of spam on the Internet today, according to a survey conducted by the ChooseYourMail Website.

"Not just spammers for hire, there are several portals who use spamming to advertise their services," Ramasubramanian commented about the Indian situation. He thinks that most Indian ISPs have little or no filtering to check spam.

Spam, in some commercial quarters, is viewed as the cheapest method of advertising.

International estimates, based on informal surveys among major ISPs, suggest that over 30 per cent of the e-mail reaching users is spam. ISPs had to invest vast sums to tackle spam.