E-mail is dead, long live Spam
Thanks to Anthony for sending me a link to this interesting, if populist, article at The Inquirer.The article makes three points:
- Blacklisting or filtering doesn't work, as it requires context awareness, which is not a strong point for computers. The author cites loss of mails relating to mortgages, and requests whitelisting instead.
- Filtering is a losing proposition: it is (nearly) free to send an email, but each applied spam rule costs money. Thus, we are paying someone to sort our junk mail. Badly.
- The real problem with spam is stupid people falling for it.
Spam exists because it makes economic sense. Cost to send is low; return on investment is high given sufficient volume.
Thus, there are 3 ways to reduce spam by altering the cost–benefit ratio. Increase the cost to send; reduce the response through making users less stupid; or reduce response by limiting the opportunity of stupid users to click on links.
Microsoft are thinking about the first; micropayments (“stamps”) or computational charging. Unfortunately, this impacts normal users of email, and will only drive spammers further towards using zombie machines to do their spamming.
Spam filters do the third — if we had perfect filters, users couldn't click on links, so the spammers would stop bothering — but they are fundamentally flawed. Filters are reactive; some spam will always get through, and they are never accurate (either with false negatives or, worse, false positives).
The second option is the only long-term solution. If everyone in the world were like me (i.e. not spam-vulnerable), then it wouldn't be a worthwhile proposition to send Viagra spam.
However, there are a lot of stupid people in the world.
Spam on the public Internet isn't going away any time soon.
Apologies if this post was in any way flawed; I have had a few Scotches (and very nice they were, too). Anyway, back to Gundam: Seed!
Posted at 2004-06-20 14:24:17 by Richard • Link to E-mail is dead, lo…
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