What can be done about spam?
The spam problem just keeps getting worse. It’s not just the sheer volume; it’s also the ease with which phishers can fake legitimate messages. David Berlind, editor at ZDNet, has posted an article entitled: Open letter to e-mail vendors: Your spam fix doesn’t work. Time for a complete redo? He writes:
Working with e-mail is more unproductive than it’s ever been. There’s more spam than there’s ever been. More legitimate mail is getting trapped than has ever been trapped before. And finally, fewer people are seeing e-mail as a reliable form of communication.
He presents some possible solutions but concludes:
I could keep going, describing these ideas in further detail or describing more of them. But it’s not the ideas themselves I want to be considered. It’s the idea that if the entire e-mail industry really wanted to see an end to spam, it could do it. It could get together and come up with standard ways for dissimilar e-mail systems to talk to each other in a way that spammers would be very quickly be ostracized from the system. But, despite their promises, don’t count on that happening any time soon. Why? It’s not in their best interests to make spamming a waste of time. If it were a waste of time, many of them would go broke. About the only solution provider I could commend — Microsoft — should be commended not on the basis of its solutions, but in its zeal to hunt down and prosecute spammers to the fullest extent of the law. Unfortunately, it’s like the leaky damn. Put one spammer away and another one, or a hundred, turn up.
In a follow-up post, Berlind suggests:
We have to go back to square-one on e-mail and rebuild the entire system. Who is in a position to do this? Basically, all it would take would be for Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo to make it happen and here’s why. Collectively, they represent more e-mail users than any other group of vendors out there. If they came to some agreements on standard technologies for fighting spam, the rest of the world would have no choice but to follow. Not only that, since they run the largest online e-mail services, killing spam off through a set of mutually agreed upon “standard†approaches would be good for their businesses given how the load on their systems might one day be lightened. This, as opposed to the great many other companies that profit from spam’s existence who don’t want to see spammers giving up their line of work any time soon.
Will anything be done? Don’t hold your breath.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.