Flow My Thoughts, The IT Professor Said

Meating Spam Costs

http://whitepapers.comdex.com/data/detail?id=1074104559_384&type=RES&src=KA_RES

The volume of commentary on spam indicates how severe and continuing a problem it is -- if Bill Gates can deliver on his promise of a spam-free world by 2006, he will become a hero of the computer age to rival Linus Torwalds. In organizations, of course, spam has a cost, and measures to counter spam also have costs, and the metrics for all this are abstract and slowly emerging. This white paper: "Measuring Up: Evaluating the Return on Investment (ROI) of Spam Filtering" can provide some useful advice and statistics.

Of course, the spammers try to subvert filtering, and current trends involve the use of complex code concealed in HTML, as explained in this white paper on "Spam: A Many Rendered Thing; An in-Depth Look at Current Trends in Spamming Techniques" which is also worth considering:

http://whitepapers.comdex.com/data/detail?id=1074104558_819&type=RES&src=KA_RES

Another article, with links and references, which expresses skepticism of the methods Microsoft has proposed to control spam [and which also explains the intiative in outline] can be found here:

http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/0301microsoftspam.html?nl

Posted by jho at February 16, 2004 09:35 AM