RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

It isn't the end, just the beginning of email

David Hornik of August Capital is buying into the idea that email is being obliterated by spam on VentureBlog. Long, unattributed revelation from a "senior scientist who is intimately familiar with the plumbing of the Web and is currently in command of a key piece of that infrastructure" that "it is the end of the Web as we know it" because spam is overwhelming the email system.

Spam filters work and, like most of the traffic that our network interface card ignores on a busy network, spam is just spurious traffic. I hope David isn't investing in postal services and FedEx as alternatives to email.

I get roughly 550 emails a day, 350+ are spam that I never see. I've reviewed my filtered messages and they seldom include anything I actually wanted to see. Moreover, I think the shakiness of mail servers these days is largely a function of capacity management--if a company is going to promise to filter spam, as AOL does (and which David suggests is staggering under the challenge, which it may well be) it needs to invest to do so, or leave individuals at the edge of the network to do so. AOL could, for example, push all messages to the client and, instead of managing it on their servers and let the client system filter. Hell, build the filter into the client and let the customer's PC take care of it.