mediajunk

This map says it all. Notice that Ireland is an offender (gasp!) while, contrary to popular belief, African nations hardly figure at all.

Commtouch has produced a revealing analysis of email spam that provides some informative statistics and many insights.

The top products pitched in spam messages in the first six months of 2004 included:

Drugs - 29.53%
Mortgage/Refinance - 9.68%
Organ Enlargement - 7.05%
Shopping - 6.86%
Software sales - 6.11%
Financial - 5.87%
Work from home/jobs - 4.06%
Dating - 3.15%
Porn - 3.1%
Weight Loss - 2.62%
Beauty products/Health - 2.53%
Debt solutions - 2.48%
University Degrees - 2.43%
Vehicle Warranties - 1.86%

Attempts to sell prescription drugs account for almost a third of all spam, then. This statistic may be better understood by another fascinating article -- an account of the current state of the pharmaceutical industry in the US -- that appears in the current edition of the New York Review of Books.

"The fact that Americans pay much more for prescription drugs than Europeans and Canadians is now widely known. An estimated one to two million Americans buy their medicines from Canadian drugstores over the Internet, despite the fact that in 1987, in response to heavy industry lobbying, a compliant Congress had made it illegal for anyone other than manufacturers to import prescription drugs from other countries"

Attempts to sell Viagra (sometimes along with other drugs) account for a staggering one in seven spam messages.

Most spam, according to the report, originates in the U.S. -- but is delivered from accounts hosted in China.

I was surprised to see that Nigeria didn't figure anywhere on the spam charts. Surely our Nigerian friends deserve some points, if only for effort and creativity? (If you agree with me, please send me your bank details IMMEDIATELY.)

Refusing to use Gmail due to privacy concerns? It may not make a difference; no matter who provides your email, they have the right to read it -- at least if that provider is based in the US. In another worrying development in the troubled domain of email privacy, a US court has ruled that a provider of an email service "did not violate criminal wiretap laws when he surreptitiously copied and read the mail of his customers in order to monitor their transactions" (Wired News). "Councilman, owner of a website selling rare and out-of-print books, offered book-dealer customers e-mail accounts through his site. But unknown to those customers, Councilman installed code that intercepted and copied any e-mail that came to them from his competitor, Amazon.com. "Although Councilman did not prevent the mail from reaching recipients, he read thousands of copied messages in order to know what books customers were seeking and gain a commercial advantage over Amazon. " The First Court of Appeals in Massachusetts reached its decision through the Wiretap Act which, it acknowledged, "is perhaps inadequate to address modern communication methods". So, if don't have a US-based email provider, is your privacy protected? Sure, so long as you don't send or receive an email from anyone with a US-based provider ... like Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.!

From gmail-is-too-creepy.com (no prizes for guessing what side of the fence these guys are on): Problem 1: Gmail is nearly immortal Google admits that even deleted messages will remain on their system, and may also be accessible internally at Google, for an indefinite period of time. Problem 2: Google's privacy policies do not apply to Gmail They've said that their advertisers won't get personally identifiable information from email, but that doesn't mean that Google won't keep this information for possible future use. Problem 3: A massive potential for abuse If Google builds a database of keywords associated with email addresses, the potential for abuse is staggering. Google could grow a database that spits out the email addresses of those who used those keywords. Problem 4: Inappropriate ad matching A lawyer who is experimenting with Gmail ... sent himself a message, and discovered that the law practice footer he uses at the bottom of all of his email triggered an ad for a competing law firm. As it happens, Problem 1 is already being tackled in Google's home state. DMNews.com reports that the California Senate has approved a bill restricting Google's new e-mail system's data retention practices, although it has left "untouched" Google's "method of scanning messages to display paid listings."

Microsoft is to allow "well behaved" marketers access to the 170 million regular users of Hotmail and MSN email -- providing they pay a cash bond of up to $20,000, according to a report in The Register. "Microsoft is behind the idea because it wants to reclaim email marketing from criminal spammers ... The downside is that what users think of as spam and what marketeers think of as spam are sometimes two different things. Excluding the get-rich-quick scams and penis pills it's not too long before we get into areas of potential dispute." In fact, there are already gender differences in the interpretation of spam, with women being more receptive than men to "email marketing messages", as I posted a few months ago. As Google gets ready to launch Gmail, the prospect of increased spam/marketing messages/whatever can only be an incentive for Hotmail customers to migrate.

What can I write about the Google IPO that hasn't already been written? A lot, probably, but I'm choosing not to ;) Instead, I want to share an email -- or, should I say, a gmail -- that I received from Justin Kistner of JRK Design. Justin is one of the beta-testers of Gmail, and when he mentioned that the functionality was very impressive, I asked him to clarify. Justin replied as follows: "Here's what I think is pretty hot, functionally speaking, about Gmail: - When switching between the Inbox, Sent Mail, Trash, etc. the page doesn't reload, which makes it more like using an installed application vs. a web-based application. - Built-in spell checker - Great spam filters - Any time I send an email, it automagically adds the person to my contact book, which I haven't seen in a web-based email client before. - If I send an email and the recipient replies, then I reply, then they reply, etc. Gmail displays tabs in chronological order on the top of an email so I can quickly click to see what was said earlier in the conversation. Again, it doesn't reload a page if I click on the tab to view it. I'm sure you've read about how Gmail displays emails as conversations as I did, but it turns out to be a cool feature. You can also click a button to display all of the emails at one time on the page and another button allows you to print the conversation as one continuous document. - When I'm reading an email I've received, Gmail has a text box at the bottom of the page where I can launch into a reply. It's actually really nice to not have to click a "reply" button in order to write someone back. - Keyboard shortcuts! Hit the "c" key to compose an email. Typing "n" will take you to the next email and "p" to the previous email. There are more too. Obviously they are disabled when you are in a text field. - Messages displayed in the Inbox not only show the sender and subject, but it also displays the body of the email (as much as it can fit on one line). - Last, but not least, the ads are waaaaaay less obtrusive than Yahoo! or Hotmail. In fact, many emails don't have associated ads. There are more functions than that, but those are the ones I found to be unique." Thanks Justin!

I have never before seen an announcement by an internet company cause such a stir. Google's recent promise to bring Gmail -- a free email service offering massive storage space and other enticing features -- has caused a huge storm about privacy concerns. Already, 28 privacy and civil liberty organisations in the US have joined together to call for Google to suspend its Gmail plans. "The 28 organizations are voicing their concerns about Google’s plan to scan the text of all incoming messages for the purposes of ad placement, noting that the scanning of confidential email for inserting third party ad content violates the implicit trust of an email service provider. The scanning creates lower expectations of privacy in the email medium and may establish dangerous precedents. Other concerns include the unlimited period for data retention that Google’s current policies allow, and the potential for unintended secondary uses of the information Gmail will collect and store." Meanwhile, Google points to its privacy policy, which states: "We serve highly relevant ads and other information as part of the service using our unique content-targeting technology. No human reads your email to target ads or related information to you without your consent." But Google will store all of your emails into the future -- even after you close your Gmail account, should you do so. And though you might find Google trustworthy right now, can you extend that trust indefinitely into the future? While it would be extremely impractical for Google employees to read the contents of individual emails (since its databases be such a huge number of individual messages, the majority of which would contain little of interest to a third party), your messages would certainly be searchable -- especially by Google. One misplaced trigger word and your message might raise a flag down at the Googleplex. On the other hand, is there any such thing as private email? Unless both parties of an email exchange are using public key encryption, is pretty easy for any number of third parties intercepting your message. The bottom line is that email is *not* private. It never was. And it probably never will be.

The Yahoo! vs. Google battle gets more intense by the day. Google has just announced that it is to launch an email service, called GMail. According to the company's press release, GMail will have the following features:

• A Google-power search feature that allows users to search all emails sent and received.
• 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage space. Yahoo, by contrast, offers a mere 6 megabytes.
• Smart ordering of related emails into "conversations".
• Ultra-advanced spam filters.
• No banner or pop-up ads, only sponsored text links.

It is in the latter area -- sponsored text links (aside: I wonder how/if Google will target these links?) -- that Google expects to draw revenue from its Gmail service. Based on the storage space promise alone, I'd switch from Yahoo (my current email host provider) to Google in a flash. Indeed, the storage offer is so enticing, that many Google-watchers were today questioning whether the announcement was an April Fool's joke!