Chy Chuawiwat, the former general manager of mail-filtering concern Clearswift's Australian office, says the amount of money being thrown around is likely to yield results. Describing antispam solutions as easier to sell than "tax cuts", Chuawiwat believes the return on investment for spam solutions is clear.
"There's been an increase in general interest in mail filtering due to spam," he says. "As opposed to viruses, porn, IP protection. Spam, spam, spam is all it's about."
Spam wastes bandwidth and spam wastes time, so its no surprise that every man and dog is claiming to offer a solution, Chuawiwat says. There's not much truly innovative technology bubbling to the surface just yet, he argues, just a lot off vendor fluff.
"You use a blacklist, you add a few text words, which you know are spam, and if you wanted to you could get a Bayesian algorithm and use that. Then you can claim to have a spam filtering product," he laughs. "But good spam software still takes quality engineers to create."
Don't forget there was a time when viruses were a more serious problem than they are now, he says. It will take some time, but eventually the whole situation will boil down into some sort of status-quo. "There is no single key, and the game of new spam technology versus new antispam technology will continue, just like with viruses, in the broad sense."
Another key difference which makes wiping out IM spam much easier is the lack of a distributed and open architecture. Every single instant message must first pass through the provider's servers, thus giving the provider control over all messages. If it detects an anomaly, such as 50 messages a second coming from an account, it could immediately stop them.
E-mail's openness is e-mail's peril. Like having children, you don't need a licence to run a mail server. There's no control, no licensing body, and no grand oversight. The Internet was founded on the basis of total technical freedom; anyone can contribute to the mesh that makes it up, an attribute which has undoubtedly contributed to its explosive growth, at least in the early days. Could the founding ideals of the Internet lead to the abandonment of its most useful applications? The scene seems set for a lengthy war of attrition.
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