Are you annoyed over the rising tide of spam in your inbox? Frustrated that attempts to "opt out" or "unsubscribe" just increase the number of spam emails you receive? Wish you could do something to strike back at the electronic evildoers who are sending you all this junk?
Well, according to a report on CNET yesterday, one Internet service provider launches a service today that aims to help its users do just that. Lycos Europe (Pink Sheets: LYCOF.PK), a subsidiary of Terra Networks (NASDAQ:TRRA), which is itself a subsidiary of Telefonica SA (NYSE:TEF), begins offering its inexplicably named "Make Love, Not Spam" (MLNS) initiative to European users today.
MLNS consists of a downloadable screen saver that, when active, scans incoming emails for their spam potential. Specifically, the program seeks out the URLs of sites mentioned in an email and checks them against URLs "blacklisted" as known spam-related sites. Upon finding a match, the program retaliates against the spammer with a denial of service attack by repeatedly requesting information from the blacklisted URL. The theory behind the program is that, if a spammer sends an email to any significant number of Lycos Europe's 40 million users, the resulting wave of information requests will swamp the spammer's site and, with any luck, make his or her life quite miserable.
I must admit this sounds like a fine and admirable goal. Except for one thing: Murphy's Law. No matter how brilliant or elegant a plan -- indeed, the more perfect the plan, the more likely this is to happen -- if something can go wrong, it will. In Lycos Europe's case, I envision something along these lines: In describing MLNS, Lycos Europe went out of its way to assure people that it uses "internationally recognized blacklists" and updates its own list daily. Which can mean only that, at some point in the future, somehow and some way, an innocent company that routinely sends out many, many emails to its customers is going to inadvertently wind up on that list. It could be Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) or Overstock (NASDAQ:OSTK) that gets its site knocked out in response to advertising their latest sales. It could be JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) or Citibank (NYSE:C) distributing monthly account updates. Or it could be Podunk.com (Ticker: PUNK) distributing its seasonal corn crop forecast from Iowa.
Whoever the hapless victims turn out to be, once they discover that Lycos Europe is responsible for their site getting crashed, mark my words: They're going to sue. Lycos Europe is going to pay damages, and its MLNS initiative will be no more. Which is not to say that MLNS is a bad idea. On the contrary, it's a brilliant plan and a boon to society. All I'm saying here is that no good deed ever goes unpunished.
Wondering whatever happened to the non-European parts of Lycos? Read about it in Lycos' Lesson for Google Investors .
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Fool contributor Rich Smith owns no shares in any companies mentioned in this article.
