The beginning of the end for email

[diran]

The spammers have finally gotten smart. There is a new zombie around that sends spam from infected PCs through their ISP rather then from the PC directly. This means it's no longer possible to tell if a message is spam based on where it's sent from, because it all appears to come from the same place, your internet provider. We'll try filters,

Comments

[pluto_777]

"This is the beginning of the end. Email is dying."

I don't think it's that dire. It would certainly make it much harder to track.

[diran]

Maybe. (^_^) But consider that 65% of email is currently spam and that's expected to rise to 95% or more by the end of this year. It's expensive for the internet backbone, reduces performance, and takes peoples times with stuff they don't want to read. Some of it like the phishing scans are just illegal. I'll wager that you see a large increase in spam getting to your account this year. The ways large amounts of spam were filtered before reaching you aren't going to work anymore and more effort will be required by the end user to deal with it. Spamers are getting better bypassing the statistical filters, but they are still pretty effective. I think you'll see serious discussions about new alternatives before the year is out.