I came across an article today written last week that proclaimed “We won the war on spam”.  The general thrust of the article is that “despite continued hysteria, unwanted e-mail is largely a thing of the past”.

This is an interesting point of view which I happen to disagree with, but in thinking further I realize that this is mostly a matter of perspective – business vs personal, or big vs small.

The writer, Mark Gimein, approaches the matter from his own personal experience.  Mark has a slightly more complex email setup than the average person – a series of email addresses for various purposes all forwarding into a Gmail account.  In Mark’s experience spam has all but vanished from his inbox, although a few false negatives remain.

I’m not disputing Mark’s account, I don’t see very much spam slip through the filters into my inbox either, but the war on spam is most definitely not won.  Mark hints at what I’m about to say with this paragraph in his article:

Stopping spam does take effort—without a doubt Yahoo and Google devote resources to it. But that’s just part of their business, no different from all the other things they need to do to keep their e-mail systems running. What matters is that from the point of view of users like me, what’s going on under the hood to keep junk out and legitimate messages in needn’t concern us.

For an email user in a business what goes on under the hood shouldn’t concern them, but it most certainly concerns the business.  Businesses spend thousands of dollars each year on protecting their email systems from spam and malware.  This is not a trivial expense and in itself stands as solid proof that the war on spam is far from over.

In Australia the ACMA report for 2008-09 stated a 21% rise in email spam complaints from the previous year.  They also reported a 71% jump in SMS spam complaints.

If the war had been won then today’s spam filters serve us for decades to come, and further innovation in the field would be unnecessary.  One thing is for sure, if the war is over then no one has told the spammers, because they continue evolving new spam techniques and bombarding email systems around the world with billions of spam messages every year.

For a single user receiving a few dozen emails per day spam probably does appear to be a problem that has been solved.  For a business of thousands of users who collectively receive hundreds of thousands of emails per day even a 0.5% miss rate on spam is a lot of staff productivity lost dealing with them.  And don’t forget the potential for security breach if someone falls for one of the more serious spam variants.

Declaring the war won is premature.  As businesses spend hundreds of millions of dollars around the world every year on prevention, as well as costing millions more in breaches, the spammers continue to profit from even the small percentage of spam that slips through.  Until that is stopped, the war goes on.