Spam, still with us after all these years

Roughly every four to six months for the past five years someone has gone out on a limb to declare to the world that spam is dead, or at least it will be dead soon. The cure? Some new technology that returns a binary decision on ham or spam: our technological enlightenment leading us out of the darkness and into a brave new world of inexpensive business communications for all.
This view suffers from the same core fallacy that seems to always accompany the bringer of a new technology. These bronze swords beat pointed sticks and almost never need sharpening, desktop computers will never need more than 64k of RAM, and spam is about to be solved.
 
A general rule of thumb for all things technology related is that nothing ever really ends, it only gets eclipsed by the next thing. People who think that DomainKeys Idenitifed Mail (DKIM) will solve all phishing just don’t remember Sender Policy Framework (SPF). Before that was Reverse DNS Lookup (RDNS). All of these technologies designed to combat spam or fix e-mail suffer from the same life-cycle: First not enough people used it because it was too hard, then half the people implemented it incorrectly and finally the technologies were circumvented by the spammers or misapplied in so many ways that the original purpose is (continue reading...)