Where Are We Now?

SpamButcher has been on the anti-spam market for almost three years now. A lot has changed in that time frame. However, a lot has stayed the same.

The total amount of junk email being sent has definitely gone up. Over the same period, most ISPs have deployed spam detector software on their email servers. In response, spammers have adapted increasingly aggressive tactics to overwhelm, or circumvent filtering efforts.

A few ideas have been floated as how to stop spam mail at a larger scale. Most of them are painfully impractical. Too often they require scrapping the existing email protocols.

There's certainly more competition now than there was a few years ago. Major vendors such as Symantec, and countless minor players have introduced anti-spam products of varying quality. Amusingly some anti-spam tool authors have adopted unwanted email as their primary marketing tool.

In the end, some users are getting less spam, while many users are getting more. The CAN-SPAM act has made little impact one way or the other. There have been a handful of legal cases utilizing it. Simultaneously, many spammers site their compliance with it as evidence of their activities being legitimate.

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