If you stare deep enough, you can find the answer to all your problems

[andrewducker]

I am old enough to remember an internet without spam. I was online a good two years before the Green Card spam first hit the newsgroups in 1994.

This means that I remember when you didn't get any email, except from people who had something to say to you. They might be complete wierdos wanting to pick an arguemtn, , but they were an individual, sending you something personal. This was before companies really discovered the internet, so I wasn't even getting emails from Amazon, as they didn't come into existence until 1995.

Anyway, nowadays a vast amount of my email is spam. I don't both to keep track of it, and thankfully I'm sitting behind a series of filters - spamassassin throws away anything it scores over a 10. Anything scored 5-10 gets passed on to me with ****SPAM**** in the subject line. And then Thunderbird's adaptive filter has a go at what's left.

This kills off 95%, leaving about 20 a day to delete by hand. The vast majority of which are part of a fascinating development in spam - one which has stymied the majority of spamfilters - putting the text into an image.

Embedded images along with random text make it almost impossible for the content to be scanned. Some spam filters have started putting OCR in,to catch this - but then the spammers are altering the text enough to make it extremely hard to OCR it. It's entirely possible that this escalating warfare between spammers and spamfilterers will end up finding new wrinkles in OCR technology and visual perception, in their attempts to produce text that can be read only by people/produce code that can read said text.

Eventually I expect spam to consist of magic-eye pictures, where you haveto stare really hard at swirls of pseudo-random text until the name of the stock they want you to buy appears. Only three percent of the population will be able to actually see these messages, but these will also be the three percent of people who both have loads of money, and are entirely gullible about the stock market.

Comments

[shannon_a]

Yup, I too remember the Internet without spam, though in ye truly olden days I used to get the equivalent: talk spam, which consisted of guys from all over the world randomly sending me talk messages that were essentially wanna-fucks because of my name.

I was just talking with some friends about spam the other week, and my general assessment is that email is on the verge of uselessness because of spamming. The amount of spam keeps going up by astronomical amounts. A year or two everyone gasped when it hit 50% of all email, and now I hear numbers like 80%. We have a hardware spam filter at our site, and it can barely keep up with all of the email that hits it, most of which is spam. I recently had to shut down my original site (erzo) because the spammers had killed its usefulness as an email hub.

Either someone is going to come up with a technological magic bullet (unlikely), politicians are finally going to get off their asses and do something in the countries that produce the most spam which includes the US (unlikely), or email is going to become absolutely useless by the end of the decade (likely)--and maybe that will spur someone to action, too little too late.

[andrewducker]

Sadly, the technological things that would help (email signing, SPF) mostly require technical knowledge than the average user can cope with (although I might be nicely surprised).

I still find email useful - but mostly because I filter it in various ways, and then pick over what's left.

Thunderbird, thankfully, has a "person is in my address book" filter, which I find terribly useful for whitelisting people.