Last summer, a finish IT professor predicted the death of Internet by the year of 2006. He claimed that people will abandon it because after a sertain point, the amount of harmful and/or futile content will exceed user tolerance and they get fed up. Viruses, spam etc. will clog up the servers and the server providers gets fed up as well.

Last summer, I didn't believe it. I didn't even take it very seriously. Now I do.

The situation has escaladed. My email account is filled every single day with huge junk mails. You don't have to have even that small account since single mails can take up to 0.5 megs because of attachment files. And why? I don't want my penis enlarged. I don't want a better health policy. And I don't need bigger breasts either. And probably these 'magnificent offers' are just viruses anyway. The problem is very real since it uses my email account up every day and prevents me from receiving actual mail. And I don't even put my email address to be easily available.

Up to this day, I solved the problem by changing my email address every now and then. But this time I just got fed up. It's just not worth it since there are other ways, much less spam-infested ways of communicating with people. I'm not willing to put myself in line to be electronically bullied anymore.

Another thing that's been bothering me is the exceeding amount of pornography around. Just the other day my mother was looking for a Finnish-Latin dictionary. She opened the first hit as it clearly was headlined "Finnish-Latin dictionary". What did she get? Pornography. In the midst of all the women involved in unhygienic situations, was the phrase "Finnish-Latin dictionary", probably to acheive the kind of situation that it resulted. I opened an email that looked perfectly innocent as it was coming from someone I knew. The result was an enormous amount of browser windows with, yes, pornography. Which was really nice situation since I was accessing my email at work.

What do some people aim with this kind of harassment is beyond me. It probably is just another sign of how sick the human mind is.

But what's the result? I don't use email anymore. Because of the spamming and because I'm afraid what might happen when I open a message from my friends. I'm afraid to use internet for searching information since the end result can be anything. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. So yes, now I do believe that the Internet might die because of issues like this.

Hmm... yes.

The problem with the internet is that it hits you straight in the face unlike newspapers, television (which you can turn off or switch channels), magazines and other real-world stuff.

But I don't see the internet dying. That's a totally different issue altogether.

Spam in e-mail is a specific issue.

But the Internet is a medium. I doubt very much whether the medium will die out. It might evolve into better things, but die out: no.

Specific issues such as e-mail, browsing, searching and so on can and will be handled in different ways like better spam filters, better search engine technologies, more secure browsers and so on.

But the medium called the "Internet" is here to stay... and evolve.

Create a spam email account in which you use to sign up for all the miscellanious things out on the net. Then have your real account. I don't think I see no more than a few spam's that slip by every month or so on my real accounts.

But the internet go away.. I don't see that happening in my lifetime even. Like the previous poster stated, it'll be around and keep evolving.

But will the spam go away? Probably not, cause you don't realise that its people that keep them in business. Suprisingly the spam most of us delete or block, the people who do get it and don't have a clue click on it and keep the spammers in business.

hmm I dunno, I think this might be a problem with email addresses at @yahoo, @msn @hotmail @aol @altavista those kinds of domains

I have a @sbcglobal and @yahoo email addresses and I get spam (but which gets automatically deleted, no spam actually reaches my inbox)

but on the email accounts I have @my_own_domain I get no spam whatsover
maybe this has to do with having an email at a popular email provider?
or is my domain not popular enough for spammers?

they should have a "do not call" list for email spammers ("do not email")

It is the most popular email providers that will get the most spam. It's a good chance to send at any random address @msn.com or @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com, etc and actually get a real persons email account.

Yep , and those few , that manage to find mine gets removed promptly.
Took some time to bitchslap Yahoo! into that , though...
And on my GMail account I have yet to see the first occurrance.

No ; To bring the end of the Internet would require the end of human "civilisation".(Which doesn't sound too bad IMO...)

No PEOPLE, you can't imagine his problem. I have an infected account in the university.
We are talking about 10-20 or even more Spams per day about penis enlargement, viagra etc. And I never used this account to subscribe to anywhere. The addresses of the spam change every day. I just had to abandon the account. Some of those did not have my address as destination address, but ended up in my mailbox. Now that I think of , maybe the fact that I used to use outlook to get my emails, may be to blame.
Maybe a spyware send my email address somewhere.
Completely uninstalling windows and having slack as my only desktop is the best thing I 've done.
I haven't used windows for more that 4 months and I never-ever missed them.

But I don't believe that internet will die. Internet is not the safe place it was 10 years ago, but we all know how to deal with it. The solution (at least for now) is linux.

One other approach the spammers apparently have taken is to send spam to "address@*.com", meaning that if for any address they come across, they substitute a few dozen well known domains (eg, @yahoo, @hotmail, @aol, @earthlink, etc) in the hopes that the person will retain the same name even if they change Email providers. So if you once had an address of "john.doe@your_isp.com", even if you move to a different ISP and use "john.doe@new_isp.com" you'll still get plenty o' spam, even if you've never even really used that new Email.

I have to give a hand to the Yahoo spam filtering service though; in a typical week usually get about 300 - 400 Emails, of which probably only 30 or 40 are valid and all the rest is pure spam. It is rare that more than one or two spams per day get past Yahoo's filters. -- J.W.

College domains are likely targets as well, so even if you didn't give it out.. there are ways to determine user names on a campus. Most list their directories publicly.. well, from what I've seen and looked up when I was in college.

I don't know, the spamming problem is turning out to the worst internet nighmare.

Are you aware of the Jeremy Jaynes case?

I had a hotmail account and I turned the filtering system to maximum. The problem is that the filter doesn't delete the messages but puts them in a folder called 'junk mail'. The contents of this folder is counted to your account, so your account is screwed even if the filtering system spots most of the spam and the important messages don't come trough. Gmail seems to be the solution to some people. I went to check it out but since it isn't open for general public yet, it's not really helping.

DO You want me to send an invitation to you for Gmail?

Try new e-mail client like Thunderbird My Mac OS X Mail client is a spam killing genius and has rendered the issue a thing of the past for me!

The internet isn't going to die because a few people don't know how to set up email filters or a few people who download every attachment they get from email. Your prof is a moron and you just need to better prepare your email accounts to deal with the problems.

Yes there is also lots of porn but just hit the back button when u accidently go to one of those sites. Not to hard!!!

Internet won't die. It's the very best media to express yourself and get attention. If you build a homepage to talk bad or good about something/someone like, Britney Spears, you can and it costs nothing if you go choosing some free hosts as geocities. Tell me what other kind of media allows the same freedom?

It also connects the World. Linux is where it is today because of the Internet. Source code flying around and exchange of knowledge made it great. Linus Torvalds first announced Linux via an e-mail (can't find that e-mail right now).

Even the spam, although annoying, is freedom of speech and that's "good". We just need to "filter" what we want to look at and what we don't.