Saturday 16 April 2005

Pic of the day: The way it used to be. "What in the world is going on? There are so many!" (Screenshot from the anime "Ah! My Goddess!")

Spam's end

Well, it's not quite the end yet, but it seems to be slowly dying. Not the cheap and nourishing canned meat product, but the unsolicited e-mail.

At times last year, I would have more than 100 mails in my inbox each day, not just once a year but several days in a row, with lows down to perhaps 50 on good days. Now, it's usually less than 20 a day. And it's not because there are fewer pages with my mail address on them out there, I think.

I know last fall, Bill Gates launched some ideas to eliminate spam. Microsoft was going to build this into some of their infrastructure. But I'm not sure that has happened yet. Except for the XP security pack they sent out with a built-in firewall and some such. It may well have contributed to the lower spam.

You see, a lot of the spam these days is generated by viruses or worms that take over unsuspecting computers and use them to spread not just the viruses and worms but also unwanted ads for crazy products. (Because crazy people buy these products, this is highly profitable.) An unholy alliance between spammers and virus writers.

With mandatory, built-in security that you need IQ to disable, these viruses are probably having a harder time finding hosts to spread their babble. I would not be surprised if this is a main reason for the decline.

There are also more and more people who use "intelligent" e-mail filters. The last months have seen an explosive spread of the free Thunderbird e-mail client, which comes with a built-in Bayesian filter that learns from your decisions. After a while, it will remove almost all spam by itself. (I tried it but didn't have the patience, I gave up after a couple weeks.) A more effective approach is taken by Google's Gmail and some independently purchased filters, which gather the information from each user and pools them to find the pattern of the spam. It is very hard to make a spam generator so creative that it cannot immediately be spotted when looked at with a thousand eyes!

At first, the spam filters were met by a flood of more spam, in the reasonable hope that at least some of them would get through. Also the spam programs became more creative, changing the text so that it would not set off the filters. All the key words (like "viagra") were changed one way or another, like "viaara" "vi agra", "vixagra" or combinations of them. Lists of business-related words were added to please reverse spam filters that only let in mail with a certain content. But in the end, the mails became unreadable to the people dumb enough to buy from them. The tide of the battle has shifted. The spam is losing. Users are winning.