Whither spam #1

This began life as a reply to a friend whose angst level I had caused to increase by mailing him too many pointers about spam growth. I want to capture it and refine it so here it is.

In the short term, I think that spammers and spam filters will co-evolve in a way that keeps email relatively useful for most people.

I think that some spammer practices such as hijacking random AOLers Windows machines as zombies will eventually be prosecuted, but let's face it, law enforcement has bigger fish to fry than catching somebody who is filling your email inbox with filth.

I think that Windows will slowly evolve to something that's more secure but I'm not sure that really matters. How many unpatched copies of Windows 95 are still out there on '486 systems connecting to AOL via dial-up?

In the slightly longer term I think that the forms of communication currently done via email will fragment to other methods / protocols / programs. I see some of this happening already with newsletters and some other forms of one-to-many communication. There ia something called RSS that is usually associated with weblogs. Weblogs can be just online journals written by people who think that anyone out there might care. But they also can be short turn-around methods of publishing information that can quickly be disseminated.