“How many of you have had to fill out one of those web forms that asks you to read a distorted sequence of letters or a word?” asked Luis von Ahn during his talks, with the audience, on fighting spam. “How many of you found that annoying?”
As the hands were raised, he broke into a grin: “I invented that.”
Everyday, 200bn junk emails, reach inboxes around the world. This number is growing very rapidly. Emails which are loaded with
Spam has become a huge problem for every inbox, and for every website. But the irritating tests are the most important advances in the history of spam-fighting since the birth of email.
Since the past nine years ago, the system has helped fight countless spam messages. And as captchas are now combined with advanced filtering techniques, von Ahn suggests that, at least from his point of view, email spam is now a problem more or less contained.
“Maybe five years ago there was a crapload of spam I got in my inbox because the filters were so bad,” he says. “But it’s changing a lot – spam email seems to be much less of a problem than it was, because filters have become a lot better … I personally see very little actual email spam.”
it is only because of the rapid improvement of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail. But not everybody seems so certain about it.
Richard Cox of Spamhaus, tracks the world’s greatest spammers and runs blacklists to help block them.
He said, “It is worse than ever, The fact that it’s growing, I don’t think anyone can exactly miss out on … we’re getting to the stage now when any email containing a .cn [Chinese] domain is likely to get rejected. Is that good for China at the commercial level, internationally? No, it is not, but they don’t seem to recognize that.”
emails loaded with such links, clicking on which allows you to download viruses are also increasing at a fast rate. Phishing emails, designed to solicit logins or other personal details, are getting more convincing every day. And then there are the fraudulent products and illegal offers that most of us associate with unwanted email.
Perhaps it remains crude, but the near-zero cost of sending spam messages by the billion has turned it into an intractable problem.
Though China and Russia continue to rise up the charts, the worst offender remains the US. Despite passing a law on unwanted email, the CAN-SPAM act, as long ago as 2003, it is still responsible for around 30% of all junk messages.
But with improvements in filtering technology, the more pressing concern could be that spammers themselves are moving into new territory.
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