Comment Articles

Invasion of the email-spammers

Peter Judge AnchorDesk

Published: 26 Feb 2002 16:50 GMT

Another possibility she suggested is that spammers might be mailing to a massive list of guessed addresses -- with 33 million users, there's a pretty good chance that a mail to anything@aol.com will reach a real address, though whether they are interested in the spammer's dubious services is a different matter. Larger email services could be more at risk of spam, if you follow that logic through.

Some of AOL's other advice is not so immediately useful. Users can block out all email from anyone they haven't heard from before. But this would not suit my mother, whose children and friends are forever moving to new companies and mailing her from new addresses.

And she finds AOL's advice on dealing with offensive mails rather frustrating. AOL asks users to forward any offensive mail to special addresses. It also advises users not to open offensive mail. The problem is that AOL's user interface does not let you forward a message until you've opened it.

So if she gets a message with an obviously unsavoury subject line, what should she do? Delete it and not report it? Or open it in order to forward it? "Just delete it. Someone else will have opened it by mistake, and they will probably forward it," said de Stempel. She might also have said that, if it is from a throwaway ID, there's not much point reporting it anyway.

So, it looks like AOL probably does not have the huge hole in its security I thought it did at first. But it is clear that its very size creates issues about privacy. My mother is concerned enough about the likelihood of junk mail that she moved to another service anyway. But I would still like to know how a US political party suddenly started mailing to an address that no one had ever heard of.

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