for the love of Spam

Nathaniel Borenstein gave a great MOCHI talk last night on the intractable problem of spam. He provided a brief overview of the huge impact spam has and will likely continue to have (ex: it costs around .01-.5% of the GDP of developing countries, depending on who is estimating). He then described the landscape of spam management approaches. A theme of his talk was that all of the rich sea of ideas for spam management will be needed to make a dent in spam, and even then, spam will remain an issue. Ultimately, he said, spam is a social and legal problem. Laws won't stop it, but technologists haven't done enough to further legal and social controls.

The discussion with the audience was interesting. Ed Vielmetti mentioned the observable behavior of people leaving a channel of communication when spam gets to be too much. This brought up the question of whether email should just be abandoned and replaced by something else - a question which Dr. Borenstein gets a lot - to which he noted that no one has come up with a better solution for what that "something else" would be. He also noted that email is something of a common denominator of a communication channel, and that taking it away could be just as bad as the initial problem. Also, that when people flee to less noisy channels, the spammers simply follow. And with the rise of internet telephony, we are likely to see great problems arise around phone spam.

There was a nice energy to yesterday's talk, as Dr. Borenstein has been working on email for 26 years - so he takes spam as something of a personal offense.