Email is dead. Long live email.
Today I got over six hundred emails. Many of which are Engadget comments mailed to me, some are spam, plenty of PR pitches, some phishers, and shuffled in between is the meaty, juicy, important work-related email I, like anyone else, absolutely need to survive doing a job in the business of information. Meanwhile, Eric was having email difficulties (oh how I feel that pain), and in lamenting pointed me to a Sean Bonner post remarking on the death of email. Oh sure, it sounds dramatic and perhaps even a bit whiney, but the Bayesian “literature” attacks I now get daily are making my oh-so-advanced Thunderbird anti-spam filter buckle miserably, and my Wizard on EDGE takes minues to download my messages while I’m out — not seconds. The volume of static inbound information flow has me wishing I had a scorching case of ADD to defend myself in keeping up. Someone, please, fix email. It was a great tool while it lasted, can’t it be great again?
Co-founder of 
The spammers will always be one step ahead; these Bayesian literature attacks are sheer evil genius. But I have to say that I think Google must be actively working to improve their filtering. My spam volume on Gmail seems to have gone down significantly lately, so either the spammers have given up on me (unlikely), or the Gmail gang has made some real improvements.
It\’s true, they will always be a step ahead — which I think is why email needs to be redesigned. It doesn\’t have to be a massive, crazed affair, but there are things we could do to it that would slow the spammers down at least. I dunno, it\’s a pretty depressing thing to think about; I\’m going to have some ice cream instead, heh.
I second the gmail notion. I (and gavin) used to run an anti-spam company back in the day. It got to the point where I was using gmail and not using my own product. I get amazing amounts of spam, and gmail blocks damn near all of it.
Just get your secretary to go through it and delete all the spam and and phishing emails. Then put the engadget comments in one box and your work related emails in another box. Don’t tell me you can’t afford a secretary.
I can\’t afford a secretary! Ok, maybe an intern…
[...] Where one lives on the internet, one gets spam. Back in the day (~2001) I ran all my email on my old domain through Spamassassin, and it did a fairly good job of keeping up with all the junk I managed to receive. Bayesian filters were still new and still unencumbered by confusing hashbuster attacks. I haven’t used any anti-spam but Thunderbird’s built in system for quite some time though, but earlier this week I decided it wasn’t nearly effective enough for my spam-gobbling needs. So I had Thunderbird’s eminently trainable junk filter work in conjunction with Spamassassin to weigh how they performed alongside one another. Here’s how I worked it: [...]
Well I have some ideas for battling spam. I admit, it is not perfect, but I’m sure it will have some effect on many spammers. The only problem is, everyone has to follow these rules to make it effective, too many people still open spam and read it, which effectively means, people still give a lot of attention to e-mails from spammers. Putting an end to that will certainly be a good start to regain our e-mail networks from the spammers. Below is a link to an article explaining these methods.
http://cybertopcops.blogspot.com/2007/01/key-to-beating-spam.html