AS THEY UNITE, SO MUST WE: COLLABORATING TO END THE SPAM EPIDEMIC

摘要

For the past two months the VB Spam Supplement has included a summary of the ASRG mailing list. This month Paul Judge, the founder of the Anti-Spam Research Group, explains its aims and objectives. The problem of spam - unwanted messages - has been around since the days of ARPANET and USENET. The problem has moved to the email world and it is also emerging in other mediums such as SMS and instant messaging. Over the last couple of years, the size of the problem has grown almost exponentially. Just last year, spam accounted for only 10 per cent of inbound email traffic; today, spam accounts for more than 60 per cent of inbound email traffic. The scale and effect of the spam epidemic creates a costly problem and stands to impact the way that people use email and the Internet.