Spammers evolve
Your tools to filter spam must too

Boy, if that ain't the truth! Think about this - a spammer is just trying to make a living. Just trying to put a few meal worms on the children's dinner plate. Trying to carve out a legacy to leave behind for the off-spring. No worse than you or I. Simply trying to make a living.

Let that sink in a little. Have I left anything out? Yes, just one small detail - the ethics involved. A spammer, no matter how she puts her ill gotten gain to use, is a thief! Stealing bandwidth, disk space, and time. No less a thief than the unsolicited phone call, knock on the door, or deluge of junk snail mail we all receive. Ethics aside, spammers wouldn't spam if spamming weren't profitable.

There's a lot of money at stake here. From the "us" side of things, trying to filter spam, there's our time - it is truly amazing how much time can be stolen from an organization without an effective tools to filter spam. The Spam-Dam.com Spam Cost Calculator is sure to raise some eyebrows. On the other hand, there's the spammers, who's lively hood is at stake - who, without the suckers buy, would need to carve another path in life.

Thus the cat and mouse game begins. Employers and individuals alike recognize how much productive time is lost to spammers on a daily basis. Even mere minutes required to evaluate the validity 1 out of 20 to 30 spams a day - inspecting the From and Subject fields etc - ads up to a good amount of waisted time. Multiply that by only 100 employees and you have a significant loss in productivity on a daily basis.

Consider this - straight out of the Spam Cost Calculator: an organization of 25 users, with an average pay of $10 per hour, each person spending 5 minutes a day trying to filter spam, and you have 2 hours a day lost productivity, 760 hours per year, and a whopping $11 thousand dollars stolen from the company for the year.

That's why we, the good-guys evolve with tools to filter spam - taking most of that waisted time back. But guess what - spammers ain't dumb. Far from it! Spammers are extremely clever people. They evolve too. It's their living at stake after all. It's quite amusing to me actually, the strategies the spammers use, and the different tools at our disposal for controlling spam. The pitfalls involved in using those tools. And the lack of participation by many organizations - too penny wise and pound foolish to be part of the solution. 

"Brilliant" I have often caught myself muttering while analyzing a customers samples of "obvious spams" that get through their spam blocker. How clever indeed. Using special encoding techniques to mask a word like viagra or enlargement so that a simple substring search is rendered useless - yet to the recipient, the word viagra couldn't be more clear. "Why doesn't this stupid spam blocker work?" - Explaining things like this is more challenging than controlling the spam that caused the inquiry in the first place.

Indeed a clever spammer is to be respected as a worthy foe. Learn from her as she does you. As the stakes raise to new levels, so shall your own abilities, knowledge, and conversancy with the tools available to filter spam - most of all, raise your appreciation due the cleverness of a good spamming campaign. She has, after all, out smarted you for today - but tomorrow, you strike back.