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Spam Problems? Don’t Blame Me Says Email Inventor
By Joseph Hunkins at March 12, 2008 0 CommentsRay Tomlinson invented email some 37 years ago when working for a tech firm in Cambridge, MA. In a recent interview with the Times of London Tomlinson said he never anticipated the spam problems that email would bring to us all.
The Times cites an estimate that suggests on average we spend 52 hours per year dealing with email spam. This is a staggering loss of productivity given that this would represent about 2.5% of a normal 40 hour work week simply killing off or otherwise filtering and dealing with spam messages.
Tomlinson, now 66 and working in the UK, was working on the US Military’s precursor to the internet - Arpanet - when email was invented and noted:
At that time, the number of people who used e-mail was very small - maybe between 500 to 1,000. So if you were getting spam, you’d know who was sending it. You’d be able to say to them: that’s not a good thing to do.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if modern protocols allowed us to get the name and address of spammers? Perhaps even better would be the ability to bill them for that 52 hours of life lost dealing with the spam. Unfortunately, the internet was not established with such abuses in mind, and there is a positive side to some types of online anonymity, so it’s likely we’ll continue to be plagued by spam for at least a few more years until better filtering, network blacklisting, and legal remedies make the spam business much less profitable.
Labels: email, spam, times of london
