Last year the amount of unsolicited email shot up by 15 per cent, and suddenly accounted for 58 per cent of all email sent across the internet. There could hardly be starker proof that today's technologies for beating spam are failing miserably. But there is hope on the horizon, delegates to the annual Spam Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology heard last month. An emerging strategy called email "authentication" looks like having the best chance yet of halting spam's inexorable rise. All the major email services already have filters on their servers that try to block spam. These filters are content-based: they sift through emails looking for combinations of words typical of unsolicited ads -"make money fast" is an old favourite - and ditch messages most likely to be spam.
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