White paper on spam

A White Paper on the Spam Epidemic

As a responsible e-mail developer, I am acutely conscious of the problem being caused by spam in the Internet Age: having a very public address means that I get to see at least my fair share of the stuff, if not more... *sigh*.

While I can't fix the spam problem on my own, I'm doing what I can - my particular personal priority being to raise awareness among legislators and governments, in the hope that we can eventually get sensible, effective and globally-coordinated legislation to deal with this... pestilence. In my own country, New Zealand, I have been elected to the council of InternetNZ, an organization with the mission of promoting and protecting the Internet for all New Zealanders. InternetNZ has started an active initiative to bring together a broad group of people who can promote education and legislation against spam in the New Zealand environment. My first contribution to this initiative has been to research and write a white paper on spam - something that can be used as a basic informational resource for people interested in taking up the struggle.

In keeping with the basic goals that have always stood behind Pegasus Mail and Mercury, I offer this document to the broader Internet community as well, in the hope that someone may find it useful or at least interesting. Please note that this *is* a copyrighted document - you may not publish or alter it without my permission, although I invite people interested in doing so to contact me.

The document is in Adobe PDF format, supplied in a ZIP file, is about 440KB, and can be retrieved by clicking here.

David Harris
September 1st 2003.

Note: The paper was revised on September 4 to fix a calculation error and some typos, and was converted to PDF format at that time.