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Removing Spam Requires An E-Mail Makeover
By
Messaging Pipeline
There is of course good reason. What started out 30 years ago as a simple messaging protocol for communicating between scientists working on the ARPANet (thus the name "simple mail transfer protocol") had by ten years ago evolved into a mission-critical business tool. When e-mail got into consumer hands, it quite naturally became a vehicle for mass marketing, but by today it has become a vehicle of such abusive and massive mass mailings that it makes the marketers coddled by United States Postal Services seem easy to take by comparison.
And so today, enterprises lose about $2,000 per employee to productivity inefficiencies caused by their having to cope with the storm of spam e-mail, IT departments are investing millions of dollars into anti-spam technologies and services ranging from desktop filters to outside e-mail security services, and even to a whole new breed of spam-trapping hardware that has emerged to deal with this glut of electronic crud.
Much effort is being put into new standards for authentication through which a sender's identity can be established and verified. That will not do any good unless an accreditation program shows the authentic sender to be a white-hatted citizen, however most of you believe that the black-hats will be able to disguise themselves as white-hats long enough to make it on to accredited lists, and continue to spew forth their junk. I tend to agree.
Why do they do it? That's easy: economics. All it takes is a few hundred dollars to become a spammer and the rewards"odd as it may sound to those of you who would never even think about opening one of these cursed messages"can easily range into the millions of dollars.
What about erecting economic barriers? Bill Gates and any number of e-mail marketers I've talked to think that e-mail postage is a viable answer. Spammers would be less likely to send out 100,000,000 messages at even one cent a piece, whereas you and I wouldn't mind paying for the paltry few messages we send out, and legitimate marketers claim they would pay their share.
But even that would not solve the problem because any payment mechanism used would surely become compromised by these evil folks and they would end up reneging on a a whole wad of debt owed to some Internet postal agency, and be off doing it all over again with another " probably stolen " identity.
No, I have to believe that the problem will probably not get solved any time soon, not at least by any of the solutions I've heard about. Strikes me that a whole new messaging paradigm, one that is not so simple, and one that is ever so much more secure than our current standard, needs to be built. And soon.
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