02/05/2008

I have been working on the problem of Spam for 5 years now. In that time, I have seen it grow from a nuisance (20% of email) to an avalanche, to over 90% of email. But those numbers don't really make the problem clear.

So, 5 years ago, Spam was 1 message for every 5 good messages. Now there are 9 spams for every good message! To do the math correctly, spam went from 20% to 900% of good messages, which is a whopping 45 times increase. That really shows what a problem this is for everyone.

I don't know of anyone in the Lotus/Domino world that can have an email address and not have some sort of spam filter.

Spam really clogs up a vital business medium, email. I think email is now the #1 mission critical business application, passing the accounting system for criticality. To make that point, if the accounting system is down for one day, only the accounting department will care. If email is down for one day, the entire company will care, and make a lot of noise, too!

And what if the accounting system started having random numbers (read: spam) put into the database! What havoc that would create! Well that is what we have now, and it is a controllable nuisance, but a nuisance nonetheless!