Too soft on spammers

6 March 2008 - 12:02

The internet community is too soft on spammers. These people must cause billions of dollars a year of loss and damage, when you take into account wasted internet resources, time spent clearing up spam attacks, and measures taken to try and block their activities. They have destroyed email as a pleasant and reliable communications medium. They are cyberspace vandals and ought to be caught and punished just like hooligans would be in the physical world.

We run a link shortening service xaddr.com. It's not as well known or as popular as tinyurl.com, and it doesn't make us any money, but it was an interesting project to develop. I first had the idea when I was writing a technical help column for a computer magazine, and often needed to publish lengthy web addresses. When I discovered tinyurl, I found that a lot of people were abusing the service to obfuscate affiliate links, or links to websites containing malware or other undesirable content. I decided that my implementation of this idea would include tools to try to block this type of abuse, to create a link shortening service that would not give its users any nasty surprises.

Recently, xaddr.com has been plagued with a spammer posting links leading to pages promoting certain medications. I have just been cleaning up the database and removing these links, which were all readily identifiable as coming from a domain registered by someone in Israel. (If there are legitimate users of that domain, sorry, you're all now blocked.) But what struck me was the time this individual must have spent creating these pages and setting up these links, and the utter pointlessness of it. Because not a single person had clicked on any of them.

The spammer was creating fake user profiles on various forums and other services that allow direct links to the profile page, and then creating an xaddr.com link that pointed to it. Or he had created forum or blog postings and linked to those. He had even set up accounts at some free blogging hosts and created blogs promoting his products. It was an interesting exercise in seeing which sites are vigilant about cleaning up spam, since some of the pages and accounts were dead by the time I checked them.

But what a complete waste of time this has been for the spammer, for me, and for all the other people that have had to remove this unwanted content from their sites. Spamming is every bit as much criminal damage as spraying graffiti on a wall or throwing a brick through a window. It spoils useful resources, makes the online experience less pleasant, and costs people money. More effort should be put into catching these vandals and bringing them to book, instead of putting up with their activities and trying to work around them.