Forget about transforming IT or building business value -- the big push at this year's Comdex is keeping Viagra ads out of your in-box.
Dozens of companies at the computing trade show are showing software, services and hardware designed to stem the tide of junk flooding email accounts.
Microsoft started the action Monday, with chairman Bill Gates announcing plans for Intelligent Message Filter (IMF), a free spam filtering add-on for its Exchange Server 2003, the latest version of the software giant's application for running corporate email servers.
T.A. McCann, group product manager for Microsoft's Exchange server group, said the spam filtering rules in IMF are based on patterns drawn from the hundreds of thousands of messages Microsoft engineers analyse every month from subscribers to the company's Hotmail Web-based mail service. That research helps reversal patterns not just in junk email but legitimate messages, allowing IMF to perform a more complex analysis than the spam-or-not evaluation of most filters.
"We're learning the characteristics of what's in good mail and in the spam mail," McCann said, "You can weigh both of those, and set thresholds."
Microsoft is sharing much of its research with other email related companies, McCann said, including Web-based mail competitors Yahoo and AOL. "We have to address this problem as an industry," he said. "It's threatening the viability of email as a medium."
Start-up Cloudmark is relying on strength in numbers to fight spam. The company's SpamNet desktop software is installed on more the 700,000 consumer PCs. The program filters junk messages and lets users quickly tag a message as spam, and share the results with Cloudmark, which uses the information gleaned from unwanted messages to hone its analytical tools.
The company's new Authority server software use algorithms derived from that research to sort out messages before they reach anyone's in-box. Chief executive Karl Jacob said SpamNet users can do a better and faster job of identifying suspect email than computer-initiated analysis. Cloudmark does the rest of the work by analysing submitted messages to find patterns and constructing "spam genes" to identify junk mail, Jacob said.
"The human stuff is distilled in the lab -- that tells us when we need to do another DNA update," he said.
Security giant Symantec is blending a variety of approaches to tackle spam, said group product manager Chris Miller, with "white listing" showing particular promise as a way to augment text searchers and other common filtering methods. The opposite of blacklisting, white listing saves information on email senders the user trusts, reducing the possibility for "false positives" when a spam filter wrongly identifies a welcome message as junk.
"It provides a level of confidence in knowing messages from people you consider important are going to get through," he said.
"I think we'd all like to find the silver bullet that will stop spam," Miller added, "but it's a moving target. No one technique is going to hit everything, so we have to blend the best of different technologies."
IronPort also uses a version of white listing in its email gateway appliances, hardware devices that attach to an email server and automatically execute all needed security functions, including spam control and virus protection.
The appliance uses a "reputation filter" to identify good senders and an online database of problem IP addresses to help identify spammers, said Richard Snee, director of marketing.
Putting all email protection services in one box saves considerably on management costs, Snee said, and lets IT administrators react quickly to traffic changes. "Our belief is that today's email infrastructure is bending to the point of breaking just because of volume," he said. "Our stuff just lies on top and adds the layer of security businesses need."
Talkback
The whole point of a spam as I see it, is to
a) Take money from the unsuspecting masses for goods and services that may or may not be real,
and
b) To spread mailcious code, trojans, worms etc.
Lets look at the first. All we need is for an investigator to fill in the form, complete with credit card details. Some bank, somewhere on the planet has to convert that to cash. The investigator now contacts the clearing bank and asks for the identitiy of the company or individual.
We then start a class action against the culprit, with each recipient of that particular spam mailing, claiming say a nominal $10 for damamages.
If the culprit want's to blame the "Person or Promotion Company" they "hired" to do the job, tough luck, the individual concerned ( if they do actually exist ) is acting in the capacity as an agent of the employer, and as such the culprit is to blame anyway.
We would only need a few of these to get hit with some real heavy fines, and obviously for the fines and costs to be followed up and collected by the courts to see this part disapear.
For part b) the only thing that occurs to me at this time is to let the NRA members in the USA extract their own kind of justice, by way of an extension of the virus-spammers hunting season.