Spam Will Die Out In Three Years?

from the bold-predictions dept

Almost everyone fighting spam seems to think that it's only going to get worse and worse. However, anti-spam company Brightmail's CEO is so confident in the ability of his technology to hurt the economic incentives of spammers that he thinks spam will mostly die out in three years. Enrique Salem claims that most spammers are just getting by, and through technology means, we'll be able to reduce the economic incentives to spam, and many spammer will quickly go away. He admits the problem will probably get a bit worse than it is now, but will soon start to decrease rapidly. He doesn't think it will go away completely, but that it will drop to about 5% of all email (down from the 50% or so it is today). Of course, it was just a few weeks ago that a spammer told Salem that it took him just 24-hours to figure out how to bypass Brightmail's latest spam filters. Of course, I wonder what this means for Brightmail? It has to be difficult to be in a business where, if you succeed, there's no more demand for your product.
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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 11 Jun 2003 @ 9:02pm

    Success means demand dries up

    Ya know, I know of another product whose only purpose is to killits own demand .. kinda.

    The motto of Postfix is to be a better mail server than sendmail.

    I can't wait until they achieve that, so they programmers can go onto better things.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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