The State of the Spam

No one needs to be told that email spam is a serious problem, but some people don't truly understand how serious it is. The speaker now gets about 900 spams every day, a great many of them in character sets he can't even render, and is seeing a doubling rate of about four months. Many solutions have been proposed, falling primarily into two areas, legislative and technological.

The current state of spam will be reviewed, including some thoughts about the current legislative climate (and whether legislation has any chance of doing any good) and quite a bit about the various technologies that are being discussed and deployed. Although opinions will be offered, no conclusions will (or can) be drawn in an environment changing as quickly as we are seeing with email today.

Eric Allman is the original author of Sendmail, co-founder and CTO of Sendmail, Inc., and co-author of Sendmail, published by O'Reilly. At UC Berkeley, he was the chief programmer on the INGRES database management project, leader of the Mammoth project, and an early contributer to BSD, authoring syslog, tset, the -me troff macros, and trek. Eric designed database user and application interfaces at Britton Lee (later Sharebase) and contributed to the Ring Array Processor project for neural-network-based speech recognition at the International Computer Science Institute. Eric is on the Editorial Review Board of ACM Queue magazine and a former member of the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association.