Saturday, June 19, 2004
E-mail at Death's Door Due to Spam?
Posted by Jonathon Watkins in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 02:00 PM
McFeelme Johnson over at The Inquirer has written a very thought provoking, if not downright depressing analysis of the current problems with email and Spam. He talks about the current problem of unreliability of email due to Spam overloading and how the problem is likely to get steadily worse. He mentions how AOL is killing mail coming from blocks of IPs commonly used by spammers and says that it's symptomatic of the larger problem:
"This is the first serious symptom of e-mail's malaise. The doctors keep saying that treatment will fix it, and e-mail will be well again. But once the patient is out of the room the doctors talk about how long the patient has left. They know the case is terminal, they hope for a miracle, but sadly miracles don't usually come in time. All sorts of treatments are discussed - paying a very small amount of money per mail, having the e-mail client do some computation, meaning regular e-mail will take a little bit longer, but sending huge amounts of mail then takes a long time. All of this is the modern day equivalent of bleeding with leeches. Communication systems rely on one thing and that's reliability. Once reliability is compromised, the system of communication becomes useless."
It's depressing that even the smartest spam filters can be continually outwitted by spammers in the Darwinian arms race between the Spammers and the Spammed. An uneasy equilibrium may be the best we can hope for, i.e. the Red Queen Hypothesis (running as fast as you can to stay in the same place). McFeelme finishes with these comforting? words:
"Because the only human nature that can be counted on is that people are not only dumber than you think, they are dumber than you can imagine. The problems that we currently have will continue to increase over time. Interruptions in service, lost mails and the like will increase, until e-mail becomes so unreliable that its value disappears."
Thoughts?
"This is the first serious symptom of e-mail's malaise. The doctors keep saying that treatment will fix it, and e-mail will be well again. But once the patient is out of the room the doctors talk about how long the patient has left. They know the case is terminal, they hope for a miracle, but sadly miracles don't usually come in time. All sorts of treatments are discussed - paying a very small amount of money per mail, having the e-mail client do some computation, meaning regular e-mail will take a little bit longer, but sending huge amounts of mail then takes a long time. All of this is the modern day equivalent of bleeding with leeches. Communication systems rely on one thing and that's reliability. Once reliability is compromised, the system of communication becomes useless."
It's depressing that even the smartest spam filters can be continually outwitted by spammers in the Darwinian arms race between the Spammers and the Spammed. An uneasy equilibrium may be the best we can hope for, i.e. the Red Queen Hypothesis (running as fast as you can to stay in the same place). McFeelme finishes with these comforting? words:
"Because the only human nature that can be counted on is that people are not only dumber than you think, they are dumber than you can imagine. The problems that we currently have will continue to increase over time. Interruptions in service, lost mails and the like will increase, until e-mail becomes so unreliable that its value disappears."
Thoughts?
