My father recently came to me fairly distressed and said that he was ready to give up the Internet. He is in his late seventies and a casual Internet user. With his 56Kbps dial-up connection he checks his e-mail no more than twice a week, but bitterly complained that it took nearly two hours to download all the messages. During the last six months the number of e-mails flowing into his inbox had accumulated to a staggering 800 a week—but no more than five would ever be legitimate e-mails from family and friends.

While spam has been around for many years a recent press release had reminded me just how serious and widespread this problem has become. According to a MessageLabs report, last month one in every 1.3 e-mails—or 76 percent—was intercepted as spam. In April it was 67 percent. In September 2001 it was only 7 percent. The whole industry is suffering from the effects of spam. It costs additional mail management time to delete it from our mailboxes. Internet service providers need to increase their staffing levels and hardware to handle the extra bandwidth, disk space and complaints.

For those still unfamiliar with spam, it is also known as unsolicited bulk e-mail. It is unsolicited because you didn’t ask for it and probably don’t even know who sent it. It is bulk because spammers send the same message to hundreds of thousands of unwilling recipients at the same time. Spam can contain everything from “earn $3,000 per month” schemes to rather detailed, and for many, offensive adult content.

Although anti-spam legislation is in place and better anti-spam software has been developed, things don’t seem to have improved that much. Spammers are using even more clever methods to get you to open their e-mail. In the past we saw subject lines with “FREE…56K High Speed Internet Connection” or “Make money fast,” but now they are just as likely to hide their pitches behind apparently innocent subject lines such as “Re: your mail,” “Re: your document,” “Your loan has been approved” or “Your order has been despatched.” The only successful way of blocking spam will be the stop it at the source, which may mean the redesign of the Internet’s global email architecture. Until then, here are a few simple tips you can use to take control of spam today.

Avoid publishing your e-mail address on the Web. Spammers are constantly looking for real e-mail addresses. Easy places to look are in public forums, USENET newsgroup messages, mailing lists, America Online chat rooms or even personal Web sites. Spammers will use automatic address harvesting software known as Web crawlers or robots to extract e-mail addresses from the Web. When Latvians Online switched over to the new forums at the beginning of 2003 many participants complained about the new registration process. But this feature protects their identities and e-mail addresses from unsuspecting robots. One of the oldest Latvian e-mail lists on the Web (Ints’ Latvian Resources), dating back to 1995, has been recently pulled due to undesirable spammer activity. If you are developing a Web site, use an online form similar to the Latvians Online “Contact us” Web page to enable your users or customers to contact you. If you are a regular user of USENET, mung your e-mail address so that it is still readable by a human being, but will create a dead-end for e-mail harvesters. If your e-mail address is yourname@isp.com, then write it as yourname(AT)isp(DOT)com, yourname@isp.INVALID or yourname@isp.com.take.a.hike.spammer. Please don’t make up domain names as they might actually exist and cause the original domain owners a lot of woe.

Use hard-to-guess usernames. When registering for a new e-mail address avoid commonly used words found in the English dictionary. Although they may not be the easiest to remember, the best usernames are those that contain a combination of letters and numbers. Or, better yet, choose a Latvian word.

Have more than one e-mail address. When you look for information on the Web, subscribe to a newsletter or are about to download a software update, you often must leave an e-mail address. This could leave you open to spam e-mails even if the company or information provider has a strict privacy policy and promises that you will not get spam. Instead of using your primary e-mail address, get a free e-mail address that you can afford to spare and give out to information providers in which you are yet to develop a trust in. Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and the soon-to-be-released Google Mail all offer free Webmail and include spam blocking, but they are still favourite targets for spammers. Users with these types of addresses may also be restricted on what they can access on the Internet. Why not try Delfi, Apollo, Mail.lv or Inbox.lv, all of which are based in Latvia? Because they are virtually unknown on a global scale, these service will be much less susceptible to spam. They’ll also come in handy the next time you travel to Latvia or to any other place in the world for that matter. If you have your own domain, you may create multiple mail aliases, for example, leta-news, bns-news, diena-news, sveiks-list and so on. This way you can track where spam is coming from and just terminate the alias when it goes out of control.

Don’t answer spam

While it may sound obvious, spammers thrive on the small percentage of users who hit the reply button. If a spammer sends out 400,000 emails and only 2 percent reply, then they still have potentially captured the attention of 8,000 people—not bad for a day’s work and a marketing campaign that cost the spammer nothing. Even if it makes you furious about receiving a spam e-mail, don’t reply as the first thing this will do is to confirm that your e-mail address is in fact real and being read by a human being. By opening a spam e-mail you may also risk the chance of your computer getting the latest virus (more than 200 new virus strains appear every month). Instead of replying you can help fight spam by visiting the Web site spam.abuse.net.

Spam blockers or filters will attempt to classify incoming messages as spam, good e-mails or undetermined. This means that you can have spam or undetermined messages automatically filed in a different mail folder where they won’t interrupt the reading of legitimate e-mails. Spam blockers or filters can be installed on your computer (normally as plug-ins to your e-mail software), be filtered by your ISP or be made available from an external spam filtering service.

If you decide to install the software on your computer you will need to train the software to differentiate spam from legitimate e-mails. This involves examining a good sample size of both sorts of e-mail and then using these clues to make intelligent decisions when examining new messages. A probability figure between 1 and 100 is calculated indicating how “spammy” the message is. Spam filtering software is now claiming to be 99 percent reliable, but for businesses where every new lead is important the 1 percent is still significant.

ISPs may also install block lists that include numeric IP (or Internet protocol) addresses of known spammers and troublemakers. In some cases, ISPs block all e-mail from China and Hong Kong, top sources for spam. In theory, the spam filtering software should work with most European languages including Latvian.

With so much spam clogging our e-mail networks and up to several hundred new messages entering our inboxes daily, it is very easy to accidentally delete an e-mail that at first glance may seem to be spam. Make it easy on your recipients and improve your chances of getting through to them by including descriptive text in the subject field. If you’re sending an e-mail with a blank subject line or a subject such as “Hello”, “Re:”, “Hi” or “Your document”, the don’t expect a reply too soon.

In the United States, California law requires marketers to place the letters “ADV” in the subject line signifying an advertisement. The Latvians Online Update newsletter is sent out with the subject line text prefixed by “Latvians Online” so that subscribers can instantly recognise they are receiving their next Update newsletter. As Latvians we also have the advantage of including Latvian words that spammers have not yet learned.

My father is smiling again. I have set him up with a new ISP that includes free spam filtering. It is now his third week and he has not received one spam e-mail. With the low volume of e-mails he sometimes wonders whether his e-mail is working at all. Lucky him!

Bookmakers in the United Kingdom predicted that Sakis Rouvas of Greece would win the Eurovision Song Contest this year, according to news reports. My daughter and I, who have become perhaps a bit obsessed with the competition, could not have imagined a worse result.

The bookmakers figured that Greece’s entry, “Shake It,” would take the Eurovision title. For us, the song had no value and the way Rouvas shook it on stage should have been an embarassment for Greece.

For the second year in a row, we hooked my laptop computer to our television set in the living room, briefly marveling at how modern technology allowed us to sit on a couch in Minnesota while watching a television program originating live in Turkey. But as the votes came in from across Europe after all 24 finalists performed live May 15 in Istanbul, we couldn’t believe Greece actually found itself in a three-way race for the title with Serbia and Montenegro and with Ukraine. Greece was even in first several times.

(Latvia’s entry, “Dziesma par laimi” by the duo Fomins & Kleins, failed to get past the May 12 semifinal, landing in 17th place. That means Latvia next year again will have to compete in the semifinal, rather than automatically being entered in the final.)

The final was broadcast this year in 36 nations, where viewers were invited to vote by telephone after all 24 finalists performed. One is not allowed to vote for one’s own national entry. Votes are converted to points, with each country giving 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 and 12 points to other countries.

The usual geopolitics and ethnopolitics certainly played a role in how the televoting proceeded. Balkan audiences supported their Balkan brethren. The Scandinavians supported each other. Russia gave its top votes to Ukraine and Serbia.

Latvia gave its highest votes, 12 and 10, to Ukraine and Russia, respectively. Neither Estonia nor Lithuania were in the final, either. Eurovision voters in both of those countries also gave their top votes to Ukraine.

But through all that there also was a sense that the popularity of some songs had a bearing on the results. Why the Greek entry should be popular, however, did not make sense. As they say, there’s no accounting for taste.

I’m not prone to expressions of glee, but did find myself halfway off the couch in excitement when the final results were tallied and Ruslana Lyzhicko’s “Wild Dances” was pronounced the winner. Next year, the 50th anniversary Eurovision contest will be held in Ukraine.

Already naysayers are again slamming Eurovision as a kettle of kitsch—or worse. Of course many of the songs are tripe, but it seems the loudest complaints come from nations whose tripe didn’t win. Many of the complaints come from western Europe, where Eurovision has not been held now for three years (last year it was in Latvia and the year before that in Estonia). Perhaps the griping will end once someone from England, France or some other country in “Old Europe” reclaims the title.

Media notes

A couple of notes about media in Latvia, both about television.

First, Latvijas Televīzija (Latvian State Television) has a new director general. Jānis Holšteins has been named to permanently fill the post left vacant when the repatriant Uldis Grava quit Jan. 16. Holšteins comes from the LTV ranks (he has served as head of the LTV-1 channel), unlike the man whom Grava wanted to replace him.

Grava left LTV to work for the political party Jaunais laiks, led by former Prime Minister Einars Repše. He tapped Edgars Kots, who worked for a Rīga-based advertising agency, as his successor. That drew criticism from within and without LTV, some pointing to Kots’ apparent lack of qualifications to run a state broadcaster, others questioning Grava’s motives. The newsroom at LTV even took the unusual step of publically declaring its displeasure.

But the May 10 decision by the National Radio and Television Council to give the job to Holšteins appears to have quieted the critics. Kots remains at LTV as second in command.

Also, the “city television” station TV5, previously viewable around Rīga and on the Internet, now will be available throughout Latvia. The only Latvian television station with a live stream on the Internet, TV5 carries a mix of current affairs and entertainment programming (including the popular “Talantu fabrika”) in Latvian and Russian.

TV5 in April began beaming its signal over satellite and cable through the services of Sweden’s Nordic Satellite.

May Day 2004. Instead of the workers of the world (or at least Europe) uniting, ten new nations of the European Union celebrated their membership. Eight of the 10 new members are former socialist states trying desperately to prove their democratic, free market and liberal credentials to a still somewhat sceptical West. Of these, Latvia gained a somewhat unexpected prominence during the day. Several international observers noted that the EU celebrations were much louder and more jubilant in Latvia than anywhere else. This was a very public event in Latvia, and comments flew that one of the poorest of the new countries was the one celebrating hardest.

Can we speculate on why this was the case? Are Latvians naturally the celebratory type? Have the experiences of Eurovision and Rīga 800 got the locals into the habit of celebrating? Or more cynically or practically, depending on your perspective, were the celebrations in anticipation of plentiful EU money flowing in Latvia’s direction—and who indeed does not want to escape poverty?

As in many cases, the perceptions from outside were not the perceptions from inside. Within Latvia, the feeling was one not only of joy but of a kind of safety being reached. Even accession to the NATO defense alliance, which had already been finalised in March, did not bring about such a fundamental emotion of relief and a daring to hope for lasting security.

Such a feeling did have some solid basis in the diplomatic settlements that were made surrounding accession to the EU. The EU and Russia, after negotiations that went up almost to the last day, finally agreed on a formula by which Russia would agree to treat all new nations as they treated any other EU nation in terms of economic relations. Russia’s long-standing claim that the Russian minority situation in Estonia and Latvia demanded an exceptional relation to these countries was eventually written out of the final agreements.

Yet this will not be the end of the matter because the stakes, in Moscow’s view, are very high indeed. The long-cherished aim of having Russian become an official state language in Estonia and Latvia could lead to Russian becoming one of the official languages of the EU, as well as strengthening Moscow’s voice internally in these countries in support of the Russian-speaking population. With border agreements between Russia and Estonia and Latvia not yet finalised, battles over minority issues may well intensify, as seen in the recent opposition to secondary school reform in Latvia. Moreover, the willingness of the EU to grant membership to countries that still had unresolved border issues testifies to the determination of the EU to press for new membership despite Moscow’s objections. For me this was one of the most encouraging signs of Europe not being seduced by newly re-elected President Vladimir Putin’s dark charms.

On this as on so many other matters, internal political strength, sense and consistency in Estonia and Latvia will determine the issue, not directives from the EU or relying on a still nebulous security guarantee. The worst outcome would be self-satisfaction with what has been achieved and an expectation that the EU will solve everyything, while continuing the worst of local practices of diverting EU money to private coffers.

But in fact accession to the EU will pose genuine dilemmas and issues that will not be able to be ignored.

One relates to foreign policy, and the clear split that has emerged in Europe between pro-American countries (basically the new candidate countries from Eastern Europe, with Poland very much in the lead) and perceived anti-American countries led by France and to some extent Germany. Latvia will need to make decisions on where it stands on a host of issues from the Iraq war (where it backs America) to the scope of the International Criminal Court (where it backs Europe) to what will become intensifying American attempts to fracture Europe and deny it a unified voice. There will be no hiding on many of these issues.

A second and more painful issue relates to how well Latvia’s own political and economic decision-making will be able to cope with the demands of EU membership. The frank question that must be asked is whether Latvia’s political system is up to the task of effective policy-making and administration of the standard expected of EU members. The appalling debacle of the fall of Prime Minister Einars Repše’s government just a few weeks before May 1, a string of poor appointments to ministerial posts, continuing concerns over corruption, and the immaturity and volatility of the political party system raise doubts as to the ability of the government to manage the benefits of EU membership in a way that will be felt by the ordinary citizen.

Ironically, what benefits will flow from EU membership now rest much more upon Latvia’s own maturity and its political and economic will, than upon the bureaucrats of Brussels. Latvia was right to celebrate a historic alliance in a union with an unprecedented record of progress and achievement. But an alliance can only ever be as strong as your own efforts to make it work and prosper.