Abstract:

The volume of Internet spam has reached alarming proportions. This raises interesting debates on a variety of ethical, social, legal and technical issues. Although a fair amount of spam research has been conducted in the developed world, the socio-economic context and technical infrastructure in South Africa is more typical of a developing world and many issues take on new dimensions.

This research used a survey to obtain the perceptions of e-mail users on various social and ethical issues regarding spam. Information about the legal and technical issues was gathered using structured face-to-face interviews with six ISPs.

The research confirms the typical findings about the high levels of spam, the nuisance factor, the invasion of privacy and cost in terms of time and bandwidth. However, it was also found that that many users find different types of spam morally very offensive. While Bayesian and open source spam-filtering mechanisms are in place at South African ISPs, spam levels are about the same as in Europe and North America. Also, ISPs found that the recently promulgated South African ECT Act fails to deal conclusively with spam.