I’ve had a little rant on the subject of junk email before but yesterday my flooded inbox coincided with a UK government announcement that gave me one more reason to want to line our politicians up against a wall and machine gun the lot of them.

When I fired up my email yesterday to take a look at the overnights it took me a while to notice that the count was getting high, the little Apple spinning thing was whirling away happily and had been doing so for many minutes. The Leopard email client, unlike it’s predecessor, informs me of how many emails it’s downloading and when I noticed that the figure was over 9000 the air went thick with some major swearing. Once again, some bastard had used my email address to send out who knows how much spam and I was getting the backlash of the bounces. During the course of the day another 5000+ arrived. When it gets to those sort of numbers I defy anyone to actually check the junk mail folder for false positives. You just eject the lot of them as quickly as you can.

Meanwhile our beloved government, having listened to the endless and monotonous whining of the film and music industry, has threatened to sanction and no doubt fine ISP’s whose network is used for illegal downloading. Now I am not saying all the whinging is totally without merit but the music industry in particular is largely seeing it’s chickens coming home to roost. After decades of inflated pricing those chickens are suddenly headless and still running around trying to work out how to beat new technologies and protect the old instead of working out how to embrace new possibilities and look to the future.

I don’t know off-hand how much money the film and music empires reckon they lose to piracy each year. I doubt they know either and almost certainly their estimates are highly inflated. Probably in line with their prices. But I’m willing to take a bet that the cost to business of dealing with junk email is far higher. It’s not just the time it takes individuals to filter it out. You have to add in the ever spiraling cost of tools, management, storage, bandwidth. How much of my monthly bandwidth might have been taken up downloading 15000 emails in one day? I know enough to stop it and kill it through webmail but your average PC owner who picked up a bargain at PC World last week doesn’t have a clue. You have to wonder how much of the worlds Internet traffic is taken up with this curse.

The issue of spam emails could be dealt with. All it takes is a concerted effort by those who administer the Internet and positive initiatives from ISP’s. And if it needs a prod from governments then so be it. The first task of government is supposed to be to protect it’s citizens – not money grabbing corporations that suddenly notice the gravy train is stopping at the next station.