The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Spam is annoying. No one likes unsolicited junk email crowding their inboxes promoting get-rich-quick schemes, dubious diets, penis enlargers, or debt consolidation scams.

Spam eats bandwidth and computing resources and wastes everyone's time.

Some folks aren't just annoyed by spam, they're enraged by it. Enraged? What's to be enraged about? They're enraged because the email system was designed for spam. It was designed for anonymous posting. Irresponsible hit and run. The bullet in the back from an unseen gunman.

It was designed so spammers can use a false name, a false [From] address, a forged origination IP address, and a forged [Received from] line in the header that likely as not shows the recipient's name and service provider as the sender of the spam.

Every element that should be traceable in the header will be forged and false and possibly damaging to innocent parties. The Internet email designers wanted anyone to send mail that way. For a variety of reasons their goal was enabling irresponsibility.

The Internet engineers offer no block to spamming or swindling. Quite the opposite, they intentionally provide ways to shield the spammer, and are unctuously self-righteous about that. Bad guys are in charge.

Because they are, spams, scams, and evil code in email or attached to it make up over 80% of email in 2004.

So long as they are in control email will continue to allow forged headers to pass through the system, and will continue to carry mail from the spam relays.

The technology to control that has long existed. If it were implemented the vast majority of spam would be eliminated overnight. They won't use the controls because they don't think the system is broken. It's working as it was designed to. Even important authorities like Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation can't make a dent in the leadership monolith despite a huge effort.

Only a change in Internet leadership can save email. The chance for that? None. The leadership is self-perpetuating. It's nominations committee for membership is called by one insider "the all-powerful committee of sinecures." Help from government? In our companion piece on spam we explain why government is an active part of the problem, not the solution.

Email is a lost cause. All we can do is install filters and try not to lose too much legitimate mail.