Is it coming? The final demise of email, as we’ve known it! Remember the days when you sent an email and it was received every time, and almost instantly. Those days seem to be long gone. Is an “Email Armageddon” just over the horizon? The war over control of email rages on, and the civilian casualties are mounting!

Between the Viruses, Worms Trojan Horses, and Spammer’s email delivery is under constant attack. How many times have you been affected lately? Missed an appointment, an on online sale, or some other correspondence that cost you time or money? Everyone is a casualty in this war!

It’s a war out there, and the modern consumer is paying the price! It is the Spammers waging war against corporate mail servers and ISPs who desperately cling to attempts to move the huge volumes of email currently flowing through Internet arteries. And all you really want to do is just keep in touch, buy something, or sell something.

The Internet was promised as the new shopping place for the busy and industrious, and yet those dreams are squelched by delayed or lost email. Who’s to blame? We could blame the original design of the Internet, but how was anyone to know where everything would end up! I blame “greed”. 

As long as mankind has walked the earth, there have always been a certain percentage of people willing to drop all moral and ethical values for the sake of self-gain. So one can’t blame this on the Internet or the original design of email systems, it really can only be blamed on greed and blatant disregard for others. Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m all for making money, which is really what most Spammers are all about isn’t it? It is their deceptive, immoral and illegal ways that make me fighting mad! Besides guys get a clue. In general, push type technology hasn’t worked well on the Internet. People want to surf whatever they have in mind at the moment, and not what is “pushed” in their face. I know statistics show that Spam works, or people wouldn’t send the crap. But it’s only a matter of time, before the deception and rude “in your face” tactics wear thin on even the Internet neophytes! And then your means for existence will diminish.

I serve on the front lines in this war. I see the battles fought day to day, week by week, year by year. Do I think it’s getting better? Currently, the answer is NO! I see and hear the “civilian losses”, and long to help them out and render aid. And yet I myself can’t feel that a victory is just around the corner. I try desperately to tell business owners to quit depending on email as a way to handle delicate and time sensitive business needs, and generally hear, “just fix it”! They become oblivious to the war, and just want it to work. They don’t understand that we would like it stopped way worse than they could ever imagine.

Many people seem to have ideas of ways to reduce SPAM, but all of these weapons have false positives and failure rates. We’ve got blacklists and whitelists, and even greylisting. You have DCC reputations (checksum filtering), connection rate limiting, Bayesian filtering, Port 25 blocking, Sender Policy Framework (SPF), SenderID, SMTP Authentication, List Poisoning, POP before SMTP, address munging, DNSBL’s, statistical filtering, content filtering, Challenge/Response, Transparent SMTP proxy, Tar-pits, Honey-pots, Heuristic filtering, and on and on. The thought of all this is “mind boggling” to most.

Summary

Well the “Email Arms Race” is a full-scale war, with each side trying to “one up” the other side in order to keep their agenda alive. Personally for now, I have chosen a Challenge/Response based system. Challenge Response systems have plenty of issues too, I could go on and on with comment on just this one method alone. It’s not the perfect weapon, but for now it will have to do, since there is no “silver bullet” to stop Spam (UCE). 

And what would any war be without vigilantes? Some of the very RBL’s that originally helped reduce Spam have now become part of the problem. These services help watch for known spam sources and then provide lists for others to avoid Spam from known sources. But who is watching the watchers? Get on one of these lists, and then trying to get off can be a living hell, with “borderline extortion” not out of the equation.

I would love to provide my email address in order to stimulate lively discussion and/or debate, but even “munging” the address would not protect me from the fall-out I would probably receive. Besides, your emails would probably get lost in all the attempts to combat Spam anyway. :-)

Feel free to visit our forums for a lively debate on spam and how to combat it.

Keep up the fight!