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July 27, 2007
Expert: Spam Sucks, and Conferences Discussing This Fact Are Pointless
Spam: You've Come a Long Way, Baby
The FTC revisited the issue of spam again in 2003, where things got so heated that then-Commissioner Orson Swindle (a former Marine and "Hanoi Hilton" survivor) had to physically separate two attendees who nearly came to blows.
The tensions that were so evident in 2003 were no where to be seen in 2007. Even the appearance of the notorious Scott Richter, who once famously described himself in an interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as a not a spammer but rather a "high volume email deployer," was met with yawns. What became quite clear during the course of the two-day event was that not a lot of progress has been made in the intervening four years since the last spam event. Proposals for increasing the security of email against forgeries and phishing, some of which were first debuted in 2003 (and at a subsequent event devoted to email authentication issues in 2004) are still being hotly debated instead of deployed.
It seems like a lot of energy went into pushing SPF through, fighting over Microsoft's initial attempts to patent standards it should have just left in the public domain, then learning that SPF, which nobody thinking reasonably believed was a silver bullet, was not a silver bullet. Since then, the tone seems to be one of resignation, with the occasional glimmer of emotion and genuinely disturbing outpouring of ill wishes for forced sodomy or a good shanking when a particularly odious spammer gets federal time.
I've talked to admins who deal with large e-mail user bases and I've never walked away feeling much hope that anyone was genuinely interested in getting behind much of anything. Technically proficient users have built personalized spam barricades that, considering the challenge posed, work wonderfully. The average SpamAssassin user probably has a lot more trouble with false positives than misses. Some of them are largely disinterested in user complaints because they imagine the users probably do nothing in self-defense and may even make their own problems worse with crappy habits. But when those proficient users inflict their preferred tool on general user populations, the users hate it. The one solution most normal users can abide is the one the elites hate the worst.
Worse, widespread belief among some technical elites that spam has broken e-mail beyond any repair means any sense of urgency about fixing the problem is fading. When we start seeing things like five.sentenc.es getting nods of approval from advanced users, it's a sign that e-mail has become more tired than wired ... a chore that it's more cool to hate than do well in the face of less open, more selective modes of communication (like IM and even Twitter).
That isn't going to change with the current crop of teen users, who'll be bringing their expectations to the technology businesses deploy in a decade. They're used to the relatively gated world of whitelist IM and SMS, and they think e-mail is for old people.
I'd guess the next anti-spam conference will be even more depressing.
Posted by mhall at 8:43 PM | Add Comment
Acutally, teen users regard email addresses as disposable.
By the time a kid is 18, he has probably had 18 different email addresses, all of them collecting spam unseen at aol, yahoo, google, etc.
Hi, Gus,
You're no doubt right about all those fallow e-mail accounts.
My "old people" crack, however, came from a 2005 Pew Internet Life study that reported teens "view email as something you use to talk to 'old people,' institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups."
We don't allow links in the comments, so here's the URL:
http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=162
hey, isn't that a link in your comment?
It's not a "live" link. I can paste a plaintext URL, but the comment system strips anchor tags.