THE TITANIC ICEBERG

UNSOLICITED EMAIL

The Titanic was hailed as one of the WONDERS of the WORLD when It departed on it's maiden voyage. The largest and greatest ship in the history of the seas. Not only that but it was thought to be UNSINKABLE! " Don't even think about going down...this thing can't be sunk!"

Now visualize Internet Email as the Titanic. Email is one of the WONDERS of the WORLD of Communications! The voyage is under way, we have left the dock! Passengers of the Titanic have evolved into Surfers of the Internet!

Surfers are ecstatic as they discover the empowerment that worldwide communications offers for very little money! Imagine being able to send friends, family, and business associates, important messages whenever you want and receiving them even while you sleep! All basically free!

One day a surfer thought "what if I send my very important message to those that I don't even know". After all, "I am sure that they need to this information as it will surely help them!" the surfer rationalized! Continuing the surfers daydream about unsolicited email, "If you don't want it all you gotta do is trash it, or simply hit reply and type "REMOVE" in the subject line. What's the big deal anyway?"

WHERE WE ARE HEADED

In January 1996 my passion for the Internet was born. The Webworker web site was founded on the premise of helping others become inter-prenuers earning their income from home via the internet. http://www.webworker.com has continued to be developed and is now a TOP 10 WEB BUSINESS Directory. This web site has 1000's of web pages with business resources that has something for everyone.

Our web page design used to include unique email addresses for those that wished to communicate with us. Instead of sending an email to one email address, we accepted 100's of unique email addresses from all over our website. I then got messages and information from surfers and knew exactly where they were when they decided to communicate with me. This design worked very well until the big bulk spam emailers created software to automatically retrieve email addresses from web pages. Furthermore my web site design had over 100 EMAIL AUTORESPONDERS that helped the surfer get additional information on demand as they needed it.

So what has changed....we are approaching an ICEBERG in fact we have already HIT IT! Visualize email address extractor programs that visit each web site obtaining valid unique email addresses. My site was an apparent gold mine as it contained over 100 unique email addresses....all being forwarded to my webworker email account. These addresses are used by BULK EMAIL SPAM COMPANIES to send their unsolicited email promotions to the WORLD!

WHAT HAPPENS

The morning used to be such a joy to log onto my internet account, get my email, respond to it, then onto new things. These spammer companies like to send their millions of emails out in the wee small hours of the morning...so then I had literally 100's of the EXACT same email message to download and trash everyday. In addition to these 100;s of exact same email message, these spam robot programs would also send their unsolicited email message to all 100 of my AUTORESPONDERS. This created an additional 100 UNDELIVERABLE MESSAGES that were also sent back to me.

I have tried removing them, responding to them, everything to no avail because the bulk emailers have created a system that you can't flame. They have their own servers and don't use legitimate ISP's to deliver their spam email. In fact they love it when you respond as it means they have a legitimate email address that they can market! They don't care if you are not a good prospect, just the fact that your email address won't bounce means money in their pockets...DON'T respond to any spam ad...it may just go away on it own.

Just imagine the tremendous amount of resources that are being used up for absolutely no benefit. My time spent trashing spam grew each and every day with less and less productive work will being accomplished. Fortunately today, I have SPAM-PROOFED my website, utilize Earthlink's SPAMINATOR and MAC's JUNK MAIL filter which is in Jaguar X.2 operating system.

CHANGE IN COURSE

I have never been one to advocate filtering of information and still don't want someone else deciding what I can or can not see! But I do know that it is possible for existing ISP's to offer their customers a FILTERING option that would eliminate most of this type of email... such as Earthlink's SPAMINATOR. The filter option could be one based upon not forwarding EXACT email messages within a time frame that could be customer controlled. Also ISP's could offer email filtering for KNOWN BULK EMAILERS at the customers option of course! (Earthlink does this!)

Bulk email and Unsolicited email will not go away on its own because of the 1% that respond to it. This means that 99% of the surfers suffer because of the GREED of a very few (although they are growing rapidly). These very few are guiding us toward a TITANIC ICEBERG that will eventually sink Internet Email unless we change course NOW!