Spam Mail, anyone ?

One of the major irritant of our daily life, these days, is the spam mails. Nothing can’t be more irritating than finding a bunch of them in your inbox, and then being unable to do anything about it. Many countries have made strict laws regarding spam mails, and these countries are the typically the one where most spam mails originate from. The measures have helped but not in any significant manner cause spammers are also evolving with time. What started from selling stuff, giving stock market tips, or lottery have given way to spam mails coming from social networking and viral marketing sites. In my personal opinion, the country with least regulation for spam is India.

The spam problem might not have worsened as much in US or Europe as it has been for India recently. There are reasons for it. Earlier there weren’t many servers for web hosting in India; even India didn’t have a country specific domain name. But now things have changed, there are many servers hosted in India and there is .in domain name as well. This all has resulted in spam mails being generated in huge numbers from India. Traditionally, the spam mails are also tackled by mailing service providers using filters, or the ISPs which constantly monitor the mail volume from the servers it provides access to.

In some cases few web based mails are exploited by these spam generators as well. Mailing service like Gmail, from Google, came up with innovative measures in good intent. In Gmail, one does not need to have the correct mail id, as in the format; for Gmail abcd.1234@gmail.com, is same as abcd1234@gmail.com or a.bcd1234@gmail.com. The charm of Gmail, initially, was to have the mail in a person’s name and spam generators know this well. Just use the common Indian names and you got a list without paying anything. The viral marketing and social networking sites send personalized mails, hence they easily evade the filters and keep landing in our inbox. The lack of prohibitive law means they are doing it fearlessly.

Indian ISPs could still do their bit, but it seems even they are not interested. The ISPs can easily ask those host servers who are generating lot of email traffic to stop generating spam or risk taken offline. But I guess commercial interest gets priority. All these spam mails have the IP address of the server and a simple search will give the host name. If sending spams are made an offence then all these host servers could easily be reported and penalized. I just wish to do something about the job search site that sends me four emails everyday. Alas, any suggestion?

Update - After wading through bunch of proxy IPs, I finally manage to reach the real IP. From that I found the host and it turned out to be a hosting company of US based in Texas. I wrote them a strongly worded email, they got back to me with a promise to take action. Since then those particular spam mails offering me 'fresher' jobs in India, have stopped.