When is Spam Really Going Away?

A question that I am asked by a lot of people when they find out not only who I work for, but what my role is with the company is "Will the spam war ever be won?" That's always a difficult question to answer because the definition of spam keeps changing. This means the rules of engagement and the war itself also keeps changing. For example, the classic definition of spam that most people think of when they hear the moniker is the type that appears in your email inbox. Over the past couple of years as more and more internet technologies have increased in wide-scale usage we have been graced with other spam related acronyms/terms like SPIM (Spam over Instant Messenger), SPIT (Spam over Internet Telephony), vishing, smishing, and bacn (most recently). One of the Storm Worm variants even dabbled in popup spam where infected machines displayed a stock pump and dump scam via a web browser popup window.

I would say that certain parts of the spam war are being fought better than others (such as the fight for the inbox), but in other areas the abuse technology is so new and measures to find ways to fight it are in such nascent stages that they aren't all that effective. They'll certainly improve, but while the technology to fight the problem evolves, so also changes the ways in which the technologies are being abused.

The words "personal computer" and "Inbox" are becoming more and more ambiguous every day with the advancing technologies of smart phones, PDAs, and other communication devices. There is very little from a business productivity perspective that you cannot do on your mobile device anymore. As such more and more people are using their phones and PDAs just as they would use any laptop or desktop PC. This creates additional avenues for abuse. Spammers have been and will continue to look for new and inventive ways to latch onto and take advantage of any emerging technology whether that be SMS, network and browser popups, voicemail injection, instant messenger, or whatever real-time communication technology comes next. With those changes, so continues and evolves the fight against spam.