An article written for Technology 360 website examining the potential, or more to the point lack of it, for the Government’s new Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations to be of any assistance in arresting the constant flow of garbage into your inbox:
‘Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam, wonderful Spam!’ So goes the line sung by the vikings in the corner of the cafe in the Monty Python sketch that became the source for the name of this most unlovely and less-than-wonderful nuisance that awaits us every time we open our inbox these days.
I get thousands of the blessed things every week, and yes I’ve got all the anti-this and anti-that software tools that weed-out the majority of it and dump it in a folder so that, in theory, I don’t have to do anything about it. Except that, of course, I do. Because occasionally, however good the software is, it zaps something it shouldn’t and that could just be the one business e-mail that is of real importance. Then there’s the percentage that the software misses, and that has to be winkled-out manually. It all takes time, and it’s time that could be much better devoted to other activities, like earning the cash to buy the software programmes in the first place!
Even with all the sophistication, I still spend a minimum of fifteen minutes a day dealing with spam one way or another, every day of the year; that’s getting-on for two hours a week. Put a value on that of, say, ten pounds an hour, and I waste around one thousand pounds a year on the stuff. If you expand that to merely two percent of the UK population, that’s more than a billion pounds a year. But, of course, that is an estimate well towards the lower end of the real cost to our economy. Read the full article