Email – Is there a Future?
Monday, April 14th, 2008Our systems basically blocked millions of spams every day, confirmed spams those that are totting viagra, porn, scams etc. We had a clustering system running for 10 years, we stopped adding email accounts about 5 years ago, meaning that the users in that system will start dropping.
Contrary to expectations, despite doing this, the volume of emails kept increasing though the number of users decreased. It has now reached a point where more than 90% of the emails received are spams. The machines used in the clusters have basically been upgraded till it was at least 16 times more powerful than the original, yet they were stressed out by the sheer amount of spams.
We have email accounts that were never used to capture the emails for analysis. Spams overwhelm such accounts. What’s more, the spammers used new techniques, pictures, different char sets and everything you can find to evade spams. Some even send 100 000 spams of the same type to one typical email account. To me it seemed like attacks rather than anything.
Spammers do not stop at that. As Singapore upgrades to broadband, what we are seeing is more attacks on personal computers so that they could be turned into zombies for the spammers. Sad to say that Singaporeans are still very weak when it comes to computer security.
There are two major initiatives that could help prevent spam, SPF and Yahoo Domain Keys, but it needs to be actively deployed and accepted world wide before it becomes effective. Till now I have yet to see the effectiveness of these. I would prefer SPF, prefer that every government makes it a must for SPF, that would make a dent in spamming. But I have yet to see any concerted efforts in this direction. Till then the best way is to install an anti spam software for your Outlook, Thunder Bird comes build in with quite an effective anti spam mechanism.