It is? That's news to me (Score 1)

I know people like to rant about the "spam problem" a lot, but for all practical purposes, the problem has been largely solved for several years now.

That's news to me. I work for a company that has about 700 employees. Up until a few weeks ago, we got nearly a million spams a day. For seven hundred people. Well over 97% of our inbound mail volume is spam, even now when the spam volume has fallen to about 300,000 messages a day.

I was using Symantec's Mail Security for SMTP product with optional Brightmail anti-spam as an inbound mail gateway for AV and anti-spam, but even with two servers in two different states (one in the West, one in the Midwest), we couldn't keep up with the load. We tried all sorts of things, but ultimately, even though we were successfully filtering over 98% of our spam, the sheer volume of spam effectively became a DDOS attack on our mail gateways.

We decided to move the spam-filtration to a third-party provider. We first tried a hosted service from a provider I won't name, but our spam loads were so crushing that we were actually asked by the product manager at the provider to point our MX records back to our own inadequate gateways. The poor bastard had to call me from his hotel in Sweden (in the middle of the night Sweden time), where he was on a business trip, to get me to aim the firehose somewhere else.

Finally, we settled on MessageLabs. The logfiles on my mail gateways had been approaching 1GB per day (combined for two gateways) before I pointed my MX records at MessageLabs. Now, my logfiles are about 12MB a day (combined).

So my spam problem is solved, right? Yes and no. Spam is no longer crushing my meager inbound mail infrastructure, but I'm paying close to $14k per year to get out from under the crushing spam load. So, yes, my spam problem is temporarily controlled, but it's a fantasy to say that means that spam is no longer a problem, or that the spam problem is solved. The spam problem is not solved, not by a longshot. Spammers are tricky scumbags, and they adapt. Email spam is still a huge problem and it's only getting worse, but the spammers have also moved into spIM and splogs, and who knows where else they'll go next? SpVOIP, anyone?