Next month marks a particularly ignominious legal milestone: it will be three years since the passing of legislation to ban the sending of spam e-mails in the United States and Britain. The European Commission’s Privacy Directive, which criminalises spamming activities in EU member nations and goes back even farther, was built on the premise that a strong anti-spam law would "strengthen consumer confidence in e-commerce and electronic services."

Do you feel confident that in the past three years the net has been made safer from scam artists and information thieves? What does your in-box look like today? Is it any less cluttered with spam than it was in, say, November, 2003?

I didn’t think so.

To put it charitably, the anti-spam laws introduced three years ago are some of the most futile pieces of legislation ever written. Lax wording, a paucity of enforcement funds and expertise, coupled with an unapologetic disinterest by those tasked with enforcement, means the spam trade continues to thrive. For spammers, these are the best of times. They have taken on the collective might of the US Congress, the British and European parliaments, plus the firepower of the technology and telecoms industries, and they’ve won.

Consider the latest statistics from corporate e-mail specialists Postini (http://www.postini.com/stats). After filtering more than 16 billion e-mail messages in the past 30 days, Postini concludes that ten out of every eleven e-mails sent are spam (for those keeping score, spam accounted for roughly three out of every four e-mails three years ago this week). The volume of spam has increased by 59 per cent between September and October alone. And every 193rd e-mail is infected with a virus, meaning that some of us receive at least one virus per day, and many of you will receive a virus before lunch and a second before you log off for the day.

One of the particularly nasty viruses favoured by spammers these days is called Stration. It has been replicating rapidly over the past few weeks so that new, unrecognisable forms can bypass spam filters and continue to infect unsuspecting computer users. According to Sophos, infected machines become spam relays. In the dodgy world of virus writing this is nothing new, but this clever little piece of code has been responsible for unleashing a tsunami of spam onto the internet in the past three months.

I first heard about the effects of Stration in early September, though at the time few network specialists had traced the culprit back to a single digital contagion. Marco Briotti, an IT specialist for Turin-based Softpeople Group (http://www.softpeople.ihnet.it), told me that his clients’ mail servers were under attack by an unprecedented wave of spam. It wasn’t just the tally of spam messages that alarmed him, but the timing: mid-August, when the whole of Italy shuts up shop for the annual summer holidays. Who would spam Italians in August?, I wondered. Certainly not fellow Italians.

Briotti later showed me a graph underlining the indiscriminate nature of spamming attacks these days. Italy, which for years trailed English-speaking countries in terms of spam volumes, is now among the most-spammed places on Earth, he demonstrated.

Italians every day sift through scores of get-rich-quick gimmicks, stock scams and discounts on cheap sex aides, an overwhelming number written in English – very bad English, hardly recognisable to much of the population. The spammers have no interest in scoring a sales lead here. They just want to turn the locals’ PCs into a new spamming relay.

"In Italy, spam only became a big problem three years ago," Fabio Furci, , a network engineer and one of Briotti’s colleagues, told me. "Fighting spam is a never-ending job. Every time we succeed in catching a new wave of spam, another wave, completely different, appears."

If Furci is correct, spam began clogging Italy’s corporate servers and disrupting e-mail flows at about the time that the country’s Government passed one of the world’s toughest anti-spam laws. The penalty is a prison term of up to three years and a €90,000 (£60,000) fine.

The growing spam problem is most often attributed to the rise in consumer broadband connections and the involvement of organised crime gangs looking to exploit the distributive force of millions of connected machines to scam us or take over our computer. These have played their part, but it’s also true that the spam trade would not have been able to thrive and prosper as it has, had there been capable regulatory oversight in place. A combination of weak laws and weak law enforcement is rapidly turning the spam nuisance into a criminal menace. As spam now makes up more than 90 per cent of all e-mail, you have to wonder: how bad will it be three years from now?

Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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