aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, August 31, 2007
The future of spam
Alarming reports about the total volume of spam on the Net are beside the point. What we really care about is how much spam actually lands in our in-boxes. Thanks to new technologies, the fraction of spam that sneaks past the filters is starting to decline faster than the total volume of spam messages is increasing-so the typical user will see fewer and fewer unwanted messages.
Network operators and software firms are deploying ever-better filtering tools, using advanced machine learning and collaborative filtering (if others say that a message is spam, you won’t have to see it) to lower the odds of unwanted messages sneaking into your in-box. Eventually, we’ll be able to authenticate where messages originate, making it harder for spammers to hide. Sure, the spammers will fight back with technical tricks of their own, but we can fight on the technical front at least to a stalemate.
