Yesterday, I came across a great article about spamming on Fred Wilson's blog, A VC, one of the most widely read VC blogs.  Fred mentioned his belief that the spam problem has been for the most part solved.  However, when he pointed this out to a crowd at a Kaufman Brothers Conference, he only got less than a third of the participants to agree that they had less spam in their mailboxes in 2004 as opposed to a year ago.  The article is really worthwhile reading, and even raises many other interesting points associated with spam (including some really over-inflated claims on how much spam hurts productivity - I happen to agree with Fred in that many of those estimates are really exaggerated).

But regardless of how much it takes to delete 100 spam e-mails per day, the key question is: has the spam problem really been solved?  Some of my colleagues in the analyst community claim that in fact they get more spam today than they did in the past.  Could it be that their firms are not filtering spam right on the server side?  Perhaps, but from my own perspective, I have been able to drastically reduce the amount of spam I receive in my own home mailbox quite a bit.  Of course, the problem has not been fully eradicated, but still, I get less junk mail today than I did in the past. 

And how was I able to achieve that?  By taking simple steps to protect my e-mail address, including not checking off promotion checkboxes when signing up to receive news e-mail updates, by not participating in Internet sweepstakes, by using an alternative e-mail address whenever posting news items, and by "buffering" my real e-mail address with an e-mail re-director (my MIT alumni e-mail account).  The reduction in spam was achieved in my case even without the need for me to install a spam solution on my home computer.  So from a personal perspective, spam has been mitigated to the point where it is no longer as bad a nuisance as it once was.

However, some Internet users might not be as savvy or have some of these options available to them.  For those folks, spam is still taking a big chunk of their daily e-mail volume.  In fact, spam is becoming so annoying that even a subgroup of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) is seeking a solution to the problem.  Recently, there were a few news stories about how that committee (called MARID, short for MTA Authorization Records In DNS) rejected a Microsoft proposal based on its Sender ID technology.  While members of the subgroup have acknowledged the technical merits of the Microsoft solution, they did raise concerns once the company revealed that it owns a patent application  that essentially covers many aspects of what was previously thought to be a patent-free SPF (Sender Policy Framework) approach.  The IETF committee counts with many members of the open source community, who are concerned with how Microsoft will handle its intellectual property licenses.  The same line of thinking probably led Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) to rebuff Microsoft's proposal to help AOL users solve their spam problems.  eWeek has an article discussing how some open source developers might still go ahead and work on their own SPF solution, given their belief that the patent will probably not be issued due to prior work in the area, or that even if it does, it will be hard to be enforced.

In the meantime, even the U.S. government became concerned with the issue, and the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has issued a report this past Thursday considering whether bounties should be used to help enforce last year's Can Spam Act.

So what's my own take about spam?  It is a problem that is gradually going away, but not so fast.  I believe that by mid-2005, we should see more refined e-mail validation open source alternatives being developed, although IETF ratification might take a bit longer.  But ultimately, those technologies will finally help us win the war on spam.