Junk mail clogs India's Internet artery

Monday, 16 December 2002, 20:30 IST
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BANGALORE: These e-mails provide sex products you never ordered, offer you hundreds of gifts and freebies, and take up valuable account space -- welcome to the annoying, fast-growing world of junk mail. Spam, as junk mail is called, began innocuously enough some seven years back with Internet users receiving bogus offers like the U.S. Green Card Lottery. Today it has grown to be an e-menace that knows no geographical boundaries. Internet service providers (ISPs) in India are not spared the scourge of spam. "Foreign spammers are setting up shop regularly on Indian ISPs and something needs to be done," Suresh Ramasubramanian, head of the Indian branch of Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) International, told IANS. Ramasubramanian has proposed setting up "Internet exchanges", which will help India-based e-mails to be shared rationally among local ISPs rather than being routed through overseas destinations. "In India the spam level is increasing heavily although it's still low compared to international levels," said Ramasubramanian. Such a trend, he believes, has led to widespread blacklisting of Indian Internet addresses. "Figures for spam in Indian users' mailboxes won't be completely available as many still use foreign free mail accounts like hotmail or yahoo," he said. The situation is growing worse due to lax or nonexistent anti-spam policies among Indian ISPs. There has also been a lack of security precautions on Indian servers, leading to security holes such as "open relays" and "proxies", technological loopholes, which are easily exploited by spammers. Pornographers globally are responsible for some 30 percent of spam on the Internet today, according to a survey conducted by the ChooseYourMail Web site. "Not just spammers for hire, there are several portals who use spamming to advertise their services," Ramasubramanian commented about the Indian situation. He thinks that most Indian ISPs have little or no filtering to check spam. Spam, in some commercial quarters, is viewed as the cheapest method of advertising. International estimates, based on informal surveys among major ISPs, suggest that over 30 percent of the e-mail reaching users is spam. ISPs had to invest vast sums to tackle spam. "We need to address the spam problem in India as soon as possible," said Edward Cherlin, president of CAUCE International U.S. "The ideal solution is banning unsolicited commercial email outright. "At the very least, we need to let ISPs declare themselves spam-free zones, and have that be legally enforceable," Cherlin added. He mooted the idea of exploiting the potential of 'Simputer', a low-cost sharable computing device being built to Indian designs, in this country. Ramasubramanian said most Indians just hit the delete button when they receive spam in their e-mails. "A small percent of Indian users report it as spam while very few users go further to track down and get spammers' accounts terminated." Ramasubramanian initiated the Indian chapter of CAUCE. He advised reporting spam mails on the 'spamcop' Web site, www.spamcop.net, to restrict the nuisance. Unlike postal mail, where the entire cost is borne by the sender, there is no charge to send e-mails, which are included in ISP bills. Thus spammers find it rather easy to send out a million messages to people who didn't ask for it.
Source: IANS