Reality Check: Dealing with Spam in 2005

The main thing that's changed in the fight against spam in the last decade is that a lot of people are now fired up to do something.

The problem is that a large portion of the focus is on legal efforts. Millions, if not billions of dollars have been spent conceiving and attempting to implement legal solutions. So far, the evidence is that legal efforts to deal with spam are having little impact.

Spam is being fought effectively by a large portion of users and system administrators by installing server-side or client-side filter systems. These systems work, but aren't without problems. Even with the best spam filter, legitimate messages can be lost. It's hard to calculate the financial impact of a message you never received. It is however, quite real and very costly.

More attention should be paid to creating a large scale technical solution that might in reality get deployed. This article presents one possible approach based on computing time as payment for email. There are doubtless other similar solutions.

The trick is coming to a consensus and getting the system deployed in a way that doesn't end-up blocking mail from people who haven't upgraded yet. Email is currently flawed, but it's become the primary means of communicating for many businesses.

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