An apology to David Berlind: Yes, us anti-spam vendors suck.

ZDNet's David Berlind seems to hate anti-spam vendors like myself with rabid passion.

I'll offer my defense and an apology.

Spam is a disease that plagues the internet. To date, there is no known cure for spam.

However, there are many companies and organization that offer anti-spam software and services that help treat the symptom. Some of us accept money for doing so. For many users this reduces spam to a manageable level.

I'm all for updating how email itself works with a new standard that could actually block junk email for good - but doing so won't be easy.

Standards don't change very quickly here on the internet. Consider how many people are still sending their passwords plain-text every 3 minutes when they check for new email messages using POP3.

A solution that requires simultaneous adoption by all ISPs of serious changes to the SMTP protocol seems unlikely. If you can coordinate that politically, or technically - you deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

At smaller organizations - any IT guy who sets his server to start bouncing non-compliant messages will very quickly be looking for a new job.

In most scenarios - to stop spam by adoption of new standards, someone has to start rejecting someone else's non-compliant messages. Who goes first?

I've had a few ideas on how to update email protocols without chaos - but haven't personally taken a lot of time to make it happen. I don't have the energy, resources and possibly smarts to do this in a way that still manages to pay my bills.

In short - I'm just not good enough. Maybe none of us anti-spam vendors are good enough. So:

I hereby apologize to David Berlind and the rest of the world on behalf of SpamButcher, and all other anti-spam companies that we haven't somehow completely, and totally eliminated the problem of spam without any risk of false-positives for the price tag of $0.00.

Sorry. There - happy?

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