O O Ø O O O O
Killed by a Cure
X-Spam-Status: XHTML_ENC, TEXT_SARCASM, GEEK_TALK, TUESDAY_RANT
I hate to say it folks, but email is dying, and anti-spam software is killing it.
It was that last worm—sobig.whateverflavor—that did it. When my mailbox wasn’t packed with viruses, it was packed with automatic replies from virus scanners telling me I had sent them a virus. Of course, I hadn’t (Good idea, world: Build software that that sends more mail when it gets flooded by an email-borne virus), but it raises the question: which is worse - the spam problem, or the anti-spam cure?
Good idea, world: Build software that that sends more mail when it gets flooded by an email-borne virus.
In the good old days, email was a fairly reliable mechanism. Despite the almost total anarchy behind the Internet infrastructure, email had an unwavering ability to make its way to its recipient. Nowadays, with the wide range of badly-configured spam filters and overzealous content-checkers, you have maybe an 80% shot of getting that message through. And your chances are getting worse by the second.
Case in point, my Mom recently sent me a picture of herself—taken in Disneyland—from a public web terminal. I never saw it until I saw her, several days later, and she asked me if I had received the message. Of course, I hadn’t, so I mumbled something half-intelligible, and when I got home, I found it wedged in the middle of my deleted mail spool. What’s worse? I wasn’t using an automatic mail filter at the time. I had deleted it myself. Apparently, I’m not even capable of filtering my own email manually.
I wasn’t using an automatic mail filter at the time. I had deleted it myself.
Technological problem aside, anti-spam solutions are a non-starter on yet another front: capitalism. Spamming is a virtually zero-cost proposition with a huge upside. The reason spammers seem to adapt faster to anti-spam techniques than superbugs adapt to antibiotics is because they are paid to do so. How many of us pay to have our mail filtered? My point exactly.
I’ve saved the Internet before (no cost to you), and I’m willing to do it again. The cure to the spam problem is an obvious one: start again. Email can be patched up, but it cannot be fixed until some of the underlying economics are changed. Until sending spam costs significantly more than avoiding it, the problem isn’t going anywhere.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few thousand pieces of email to delete. That, and a few more pictures from my Mom.
Tuesday, Aug 19, 2003
PD DCXIV