I'm predicting that we'll finally have a computer will search my e-mail automatically and delete every message that begins with 'thought you'd be interested,' and then give an electrical shock to the sender to remind him or her to stop send that kind of message.
I can't say I'm particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we're now seeing, whether it's filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot.
MySpace is just spam central. I mean, every day I just get mail inviting me to gigs that are nowhere near Los Angeles!
I use Spam Arrest because of the amount of junk mail I get. Any legitimate person who wants to send me a message has to jump through hoops before they can be added to my opt-in list.
Anyone with an inbox knows what I'm talking about. A dozen emails to set up a meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc's and spam.
Every major communication tool on the Internet has spam and abuse problems. All email services, blogging services and social networks have to dedicate a significant amount of resources and time to fighting abuse and protecting their users.
Anyone I don't know, in my emails or texts, I just delete. If it's someone legitimate, they'll send it again.
No one bill will cure the problem of spam. It will take a combined effort of legislation, litigation, enforcement, customer education, and technology solutions.
Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It's more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.
When someone sends you an email, they are knocking on your door. And when you open the attachment, without looking through the peephole to see who it is, you just opened the door and let a stranger into your life, where everything you care about is.
With Akismet there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective? It seemed more people would be helped by blocking spam.
I would really hate to have e-mail. It's bad enough with all the mail I get.
The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam - those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that's legitimate.
This is like the telephone problem - no one wants to have the first one. But we are seeing a lot of people who want some sort of technology to solve the spam problem.
Ultimately, Captchas are useless for spam because they're designed to tell you if someone is 'human' or not, but not whether something is spam or not.
