On The Spam Scourge.
Won Bae Kim · The Journal of Object Technology · 2004
By now email has become an indispensable means of communication for mankind.However, during the past few years, it has been hijacked by spam.A resounding majority of email users are very much annoyed by their daily struggle with spam.They are forced to glance through a large number of unwanted, misleading, or offensive emails from out of nowhere; they have to purge from the inbox and deleted box somewhere between 50 to 80 percent of their incoming emails every day; and they often mistakenly purge some important emails.The cost of spam is borne mostly by individuals, and corporations that end up transmitting and receiving spam.It includes the cost of computers, disk storage, and networking equipment, as well as all the time the receivers waste.During the summer of 2003, I came to notice that about 80 of 100 emails I received a day were spam.Most of the spam was in English and Korean (I hold a professor position in Ewha Women's University of South Korea, while running a consulting business, Cyber Database Solutions, in the US, and managing the ACM SIGKDD international academic society and the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology international scholarly journal.).Some of the spam was in foreign languages that I do not even know.I realized that my email address had been "harvested" by master spammers from my two business websites, the university website, the society website, the journal website, the website of the conference the society runs, etc. Further, in the past, I had too readily given my email address to all IT trade publications that offered free subscription, and I suspect some of them may have sold the email addresses of their subscribers to various businesses, which in turn have sent me spam.I installed a spam filter, but I quickly realized that it did not really solve my spam problem since I had to scan all emails the spam filter threw into the spam folder to "de-filter" erroneously filtered emails.So, I took a drastic measure.I abandoned my single "universal" email address.I created five different email addresses, each for different function and purpose -one for communication with Ewha University, two for my business, one for ACM, and one for friends around the world for non-business communications.Should my email address get hijacked again, I did not want to abandon the email address again and have to notify everyone who communicates with me via email.I wanted to only notify a segment of my "email communication partners".