Spam will end in 2012

30 years after its invention, spam is going on stronger than ever.

Nothing fundamental about email has changed since the 1980's. Marketers continue to utilize variations on the same email marketing schemes that have already made them millions.

In fact, amazingly little about the fundamental protocols behind the internet have changed in the last 20 years. DNS and SMTP were established in the early 80's, and haven't changed much since. While the web came into popularity in the 90's, it was really based on mechanisms that had existed for some time.

Now that the internet has millions of users, making changes to standards poses the same problems as moving to the metric system. While the benefits are obvious, the costs would be enormous. In addition, no one has an incentive to do it unless everyone else does first.

The U.S. has taken stabs at various legal efforts to mitigate junk email on both the state and federal level. To date, none of them have had any measurable impact. Other nations have made similar attempts with comparable results.

While I had held out hope that programs to block spam e-mail would make spam unprofitable, it would appear this dream is out of reach. Filters have proven either not effective enough, or not widely enough deployed to have this effect.

So why do I think spam will finally meet its match in 2012? Well, according to the Mayan's, the world is going to end.

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