Size really matters in cyberspace

THE LAST STRAW: When the Internet first came into our lives, it promised to open up a world of endless possibilities, including world peace, universal prosperity, and whatever you were having yourself.

The reality has fallen somewhat short of this vision. Based on the growing piles of junk e-mail arriving into my office computer daily, the possibilities offered by the Internet fall into about five main categories.

Probably the largest category of "spam", as it's called, comes from the US porn industry. The best thing you can say about this is that, with subject lines like "fun on the farm," the e-mails are at least easy to identify (if not to understand). A second main category is the one describing how you can make thousands of "dollars" working from home, simply by convincing others that they can make thousands of dollars working from home .

A third and worryingly large group of e-mails advertises services that can increase the size of a named male body part, with or without surgery. I don't want to be too graphic in a family newspaper; but I would estimate that this category has added between three and five inches to my weekly list of junk mail.

A fourth sub-group promotes financial services, from mortgages to life assurance. These might be excellent products, for all I know. But offered by and for Americans, they're useless here. Anyway, my attitude to such offers is the same as to those in category three; which is to say that my existing endowment package, however basic, is adequate to meet most foreseeable needs.

Most of these e-mails are from the US, as I say, and apparently sent on the basis of mistaken information about me, which has led the company involved to believe that I came down in the last shower. None of them comes close, however, to a small but important fifth category, of African origin.

The "Nigerian Advance Fee Scam" has been doing the rounds for a decade. It typically takes the form of an e-mail from a "senior civil servant" in - for example - the Department of Industry, Commerce and Embezzlement in Lagos. Due to a mix-up in accounts, he explains, the sum of $64 million has been inadvertently channelled into his briefcase, and he urgently needs it transferred to a western bank account. After a careful screening process, you have been selected as the ideal candidate (ie. a complete moron) to facilitate this transaction, for a 20 per cent cut.

You might think that anyone who would fall for this story needs urgent enhancement, with or without surgery, of the body part located between his ears (not one of the organs you can improve on the Internet). But believe it or not, people do; although, of course, any funds transfers tend to go the opposite direction.

Less surprisingly, there is also a steady take-up for the more basic web scams. In a report lamenting the state of the Internet, the New York Times recently featured a case in which Arizona authorities seized $30 million in real estate and luxury cars from a company that sold organ-enhancement pills over the web. The "longitude treatments," as the Times called them, may have been worthless, but the company directors had used them to increase their average vehicle size, with dramatic results.

MORE generally, the report worried about the Internet's "better neighbourhoods . . . where one can find learned discussion of Kierkegaard or analysis of Gram Parsons's influence on rock music". These leafy suburbs were now "increasingly surrounded by wildly expanding slums of bad taste", the paper complained. To which I would add that the morning stroll through the local park of my incoming e-mail is being made a misery by the traffic from the information superhighway, which now runs right through the duck-pond.

The bad news is that anti-spam filters don't work. Spammers find ways around them and, anyway, the traditional tactic of screening out key words always carries the risk of deleting important mail. A newspaper, for example, could not automatically delete e-mails featuring the words "fun" and "farm," as both feature frequently in press releases from the Department of Agriculture.

The good news is that the struggle continues with more sophisticated tactics. One California company has devised an ingenious scheme to fight spam with "poetry and the law". This involves incorporating a Japanese haiku and a trademark into e-mail "headers"; so that spammers who use the addresses without permission break copyright and trademark laws.

Then the company sues them.

Maybe such schemes will work, eventually. In the meantime it takes more and more time to find the genuine, personal e-mails: such as the one I just received from a charming young Russian woman who, after an international search, has chosen me for possible marriage and a new life in the West.

fmcnally@irish-times.ie