Pressure grows over spam filtering

A third of all unwanted emails received by children are hardcore pornography, according to new research released today as MPs meet to discuss the growing problem of spam.

Children's charity NCH has added its voice to the growing pressure on internet service providers such as Freeserve and AOL, as well as popular email services such as Microsoft's Hotmail, to better filter their customer's inboxes to cut out unwanted emails, known as spam.

The call came ahead of today's summit held by MPs in London to discuss the growing number of spam emails, which now account for more than half of all emails received.

According to MessageLabs, a company providing anti-spam software, there has been a huge growth in unwanted emails over the past year.

It said that the problem had grown to such an extent that the emails now represented 55% of all those received, up from just 2.3% in June last year.

John Carr, internet consultant at NCH, is among those speaking at today's summit hosted by MPs on the All Party Internet Group.

"Hardly a week seems to go by without another appalling case reaching the courts where a child has been sexually assaulted by another paedophile they first met online," he said.

"We believe to limit the dangers internet service providers which allow children to have web addresses should use the best possible anti-spam software," added Mr Carr.

For their part, ISPs insist they are doing as much as they can to tackle the problem, with many of them recently introducing new software to try and deal with the threat of spam. But MPs are likely to argue today that the measures do not go far enough.

Much of the junk mail, including adverts for porn, is sent from outside the EU and are virtually impossible to trace.

New EU laws to govern spam recently came into force but are likely to do little to stem the flow of emails promoting get rich quick schemes, pornography and chain letters.

In a further setback for campaigning groups looking to stem the flood of unwanted mail, the California supreme court yesterday ruled that spammers could not be sued under state law for property trespass.

The move was a blow for computer giant Intel, which had sued a former engineer for sending emails to up to 35,000 company workers.

The 4-3 ruling reversed an earlier decision that prohibited former Intel engineer Ken Hamidi from sending emails critical of Intel to thousands of its employees.

Intel claimed the emails had trespassed on its private network and had harmed the company by reducing worker productivity. But the court found that Intel's computer system had not been physically damaged as a result of the emails and that, therefore, there was no trespass.

The court declined to expand state common law covering property trespass to apply to email whose contents may be objectionable, but which is otherwise harmless.

"Creating an absolute property right to exclude undesired communications from one's email and web servers might help force spammers to internalise the costs they impose on ISPs [internet service providers] and their customers," the court wrote.

"But such a property rule might also create substantial new costs, to email and e-commerce users and to society generally, in lost ease and openness of communication and in lost network benefits," it added.

"In light of the unresolved controversy, we would be acting rashly to adopt a rule treating computer servers as real property for purposes of trespass law."