BYTE MARKS
Banding together to fight spam

By Burt Lum

"Reduce your debt!" "New Britney Spears video!" "Poker Game tonight." Those are just a few of the hundreds of unsolicited and unwanted e-mails I receive daily. That's right, daily. I am sure you are experiencing the same level of annoyance as I am. Periodically, I will take an informal survey of the spam situation with people I know and uniformly there is a growing concern over the avalanche of unwanted mail. Learn more at spam.abuse.net.

As one man's trash becomes another man's treasure, spam offers an opportunity for an innovative software developer to create a filtering application. Paid for or not, an application that successfully reduces or eliminates spam would be snapped up by many e-mail users. Obviously it is not as easy as that. There was a time not long ago, where a few rules in Outlook Express would do the trick. But because of the sophistication of spam perpetrators, the rules approach is pretty useless.

This has paved the way for new apps like the P2P SpamNet offering from Cloudmark at www.cloudmark.com. The press showered SpamNet with accolades and you can find many of those on their Web site. The concept sounds brilliant. Create a network of users that all contribute to a database of known spam e-mails. This growing database then becomes a collective effort against spam. Like a neighborhood watch, more eyes are better than only a pair. My only problem is its limited release to Outlook 2000/XP on the PC. It is becoming harder and harder to be a Macintosh user. ;-(

Regardless, I support the efforts of Cloudmark and others in this software arena wholeheartedly. The alternative to a private-sector solution is one from Washington and that is even scarier than spam itself. One solution that first appeared as an urban myth was a proposal that the federal government would charge for e-mail. That would certainly curb spam, along with e-mail in general. Check out who's fighting for the cause in Washington at news.com.com/2008-1082-956523.html. ;-)

Burt Lum is a click away at burt@brouhaha.net.